Intro

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Revision as of 14:33, 4 June 2004 by Guanxi (talk | contribs) (clean up wording)
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What is Mozilla?

Mozilla is both the name of a web application and the name of the organization that makes it. The Mozilla Application Suite includes a web browser, e-mail software, and more. Mozilla the organization is a non-profit foundation and many volunteers that create the web suite and other applications; The future, cutting edge browser, Firefox, and e-mail program, Thunderbird; other sub-projects and spinoffs of the web suite; products that aid the web application development; and more.

Mozilla and Netscape

Mozilla and Netscape have had an interesting relationship. Netscape was the company that created the open-source Mozilla project by contributing pre-5.0 Netscape beta code. This code was eventually abandoned in favor of a ground-up rewrite of the browser, from which future Netscape releases were made. Although it came too late to help Netscape in the Browser Wars, beta versions of the Mozilla Suite formed the basis for Netscape 6.x versions, and the version 1.0 release of Mozilla was combined with proprietary components such as AIM and Netscape Radio to create Netscape 7.

The Gecko Rendering Engine

The Gecko rendering engine is the code that decides how all web content should be displayed. Gecko has a well-deserved reputation for industry-leading support of web standards, alongside robust support for the proprietary extensions and "tag-soup" accepted by older browsers. Gecko can render most pages on the web today; errors are few and far between and the Gecko rendering engine is usually a blessing for web developers who want to dabble in the latest and the newest in web technologies such as: SVG, XML, XSL, CSS, XHTML, DOM, and other W3C recommendations. Gecko also generates the user interface for Mozilla Suite, Firefox, and Thunderbird using XUL, the XML User-interface Language.

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