Mozilla is a term used in a number of ways in relation to the Mozilla project and the Mozilla Foundation, their defunct commercial predecessor Netscape Communications Corporation, and their related application software. Specifically, it is or was:
These and various other related uses of the term Mozilla are discussed below in the order when they were first used.
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Historically, Mozilla had been used internally as a codename for the Netscape Navigator web browser from its beginning. Jamie Zawinski came up with the name during a meeting while working at the company.[1] The name was created as a portmanteau of the words "Mosaic killer",[2] hinting that Netscape would be the end to the (then only) competitor browser, Mosaic. The logo was a reference to the name of the fictional monster Godzilla.
Mozilla was the mascot of the now-disbanded Netscape Communications Corporation, formerly called Mosaic Communications Corporation. Initially, the mascot took various forms, including that of a helmeted astronaut or "spaceman", but the eventual choice was a Godzilla-like lizard thought to go well with the name. It was designed by Dave Titus in 1994.
Mozilla was featured prominently on Netscape's website in the company's early years. However, the need to project a more "professional" image (especially towards corporate clients) led to it being removed. Mozilla continued to be used inside Netscape, though, often featured on T-shirts given to staff or on artwork adorning the walls of the Netscape campus in Mountain View. The color of the Mozilla lizard changed from its original green to a red version of the monster after the source code of the Netscape browser was released.[3]
When Netscape acquired the website directory NewHoo in 1998, they re-branded it the Open Directory Project with the nickname "dmoz" (Directory of Mozilla) due to its similarity to the Mozilla project. An image of Mozilla was placed on every page of the site, which remains the case today. Netscape Communications continued using the image of the red Mozilla in its iconography [4] in the Mozilla.org project web site.
When users visit a website (using "user agent" software such as a web browser), a text string is generally sent to identify the user agent to the web server. It is known as the "user agent string". The Netscape web browser identified itself as "Mozilla/<version>" followed by some information about the operating system it was running on.
Because the Netscape browser initially implemented many features not available in other browsers and quickly came to dominate the market, a number of web sites were designed to work, or work fully, only when they detected an appropriate version of Mozilla in the user agent string. Thus, competing browsers began to emulate ("cloak" or "spoof") this string in order to also work with those sites. The earliest example of this is Internet Explorer's use of a user agent string beginning "Mozilla/<version> (compatible; MSIE <version>...", in order to receive content intended for Netscape, its main rival at the time of its development. This format of user agent string has since been copied by other user agents, and persisted even after Internet Explorer came to dominate the browser market.
"Mozilla" is the every-day name for the free and open-source software project that was founded in 1998 in order to create a next-generation Internet suite for Netscape. On 15 July 2003, the organization was formally registered as a non-profit organization, and became the Mozilla Foundation. The foundation now creates and maintains the Mozilla Firefox browser and Mozilla Thunderbird email application, among other software, and holds the Mozilla trademarks.
On 3 August 2005, the Mozilla Foundation announced the creation of Mozilla Corporation, described as "a taxable subsidiary that serves the non-profit, public benefit goals of its parent, the Mozilla Foundation, and that will be responsible for product development, marketing and distribution of Mozilla products."[5]
The Mozilla project's initial software offering was known as the "Mozilla Application Suite".
In 2004, the Foundation announced that it would be no longer maintaining the suite, in order to focus its attention on the standalone products Firefox and Thunderbird, which are built on the same Gecko layout engine. The suite was renamed SeaMonkey and was handed over to the SeaMonkey Council, which has continued the development within the Mozilla community.
The term Mozilla is also occasionally used to refer to the Mozilla application framework, a cross-platform application framework for writing applications that can run on multiple operating systems. It consists most notably of the Gecko layout engine, but also the XUL user-interface toolkit, the Necko networking library, and other components. This is the core that all Mozilla-based browsers and applications are built from.
Source code for Mozilla software projects such as Firefox, Thunderbird, and XULRunner are managed collectively in a single Mercurial repository. This large codebase is referred to as the Mozilla codebase, the Mozilla source code, or just Mozilla.
The Mozilla codebase was originally released under the Netscape Public License. Shortly afterwards, the license was updated to version 1.1 and renamed the Mozilla Public License (MPL). The Free Software Foundation and others noted that a GPL-licensed module and an MPL-license module cannot be legally linked, and they recommend that developers not use the MPL for this reason.[6] To address this concern, between 2001 and 2004 the Mozilla Foundation relicensed all of the Mozilla codebase under the GNU General Public License and GNU Lesser General Public License as well as the Mozilla Public License.[7]
| * Bugzilla | : | a bug tracking tool |
| * Camino | : | a web browser for Mac |
| * Minimo | : | a project to create a version of the Mozilla web browser |
| * Mozilla Skywriter | : | formerly known as Bespin |
| * Mozilla Firefox | : | a web browser |
| * Mozilla Firefox for mobile | : | the name of the build of the Mozilla Firefox web browser for devices such as mobile phones and personal digital assistants (PDAs). |
| * Mozilla Thunderbird | : | a mail client |
| * Firefox Sync | : | formerly known as Mozilla Weave |
| * SeaMonkey | : | a free and open source cross-platform Internet suite. |
| * Tinderbox | : | a software suite that provides continuous integration capability |
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