MozillaZine

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

MozillaZine is a popular unofficial website about the Mozilla project and is considered to be the main site of the Mozilla community (which also includes sites such as mozdev.org and XULPlanet).

Primarily, MozillaZine reports news about the Mozilla Project. As it is dedicated to Mozilla, it tends to report on developments before any one else and its information is highly accurate. Despite the site's advocacy tag, its reporting is considered to be unbiased and fair. The site also hosts the most active Mozilla forums on the web, a community-driven knowledge base of information about Mozilla products, and a number of weblogs by Mozilla developers. Previously, it also hosted Asa Dotzler's comments about the latest nightly builds.

The site was founded by Chris Nelson on September 1, 1998 (just a few months after mozilla.org, which was created on February 23, 1998), and quickly grew in popularity. Many improvements were added to the site (such as the ability to comment on articles) and it soon moved to the mozillazine.org domain and replaced its orange colour scheme with a green-blue one featuring the MozillaZine blimp. Originally, the site's main audience was Mozilla developers (both Netscape employees and outsiders), but it soon attracted interested observers and, more recently, end users. On November 14, 1998, MozillaZine merged with MozBin, which brought its webmaster, Jason Kersey, onboard. Chris Nelson phased out his involvement with the site from the beginning of 2001 onwards. In May 2002, Alex Bishop became the site's third member of staff.

Many mistake the site as being an official mouthpiece for Mozilla. However, the site is completely independent of the Mozilla Foundation, though it does maintain good relations with many of the staff.

In the spirit of open source, MozillaZine allows its content to be translated into different languages by anyone who has the time to spare. Currently, volunteers have made French, Japanese, Chinese, German, Korean, Spanish and Hungarian translations available. MozillaZine also syndicates its content via Atom and RSS feeds. Many sites, including Slashdot and Google News, carry MozillaZine's headlines. There is also a #mozillazine IRC channel on irc.mozilla.org.