Intro
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
Gecko is a rendering engine, the fundemental program that converts web programming code (e.g. HTML and XML) into the web page you see on your screen. It's a component of the Mozilla organizations' web browsers, e-mail programs, and anything else that displays web pages. Gecko has a well-deserved reputation for industry-leading support of web standards, alongside the flexibility to support the non-standard code often found on the web. Gecko correctly renders almost every page on today's web and Gecko helps website developers move forward by supporting the latest in web technologies such as SVG, XML, XSL, CSS, XHTML, and DOM. Gecko also renders the user interface for Mozilla Suite, Firefox, and Thunderbird using XUL, the XML User-interface Language.
