Mozilla, Mozilla

Netscape Communications corp continued using the image of the red Mozilla in its iconography [2] in the Mozilla.org project web site.

It is known as the "user agent string". The Netscape web browser identified itself as " Mozilla/ " followed by some information about the operating system it was running on.

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/ (compatible; MSIE ... ", 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.

The Mozilla Organization was founded in 1998 to create the new suite. On July 15, 2003, the organization was formally registered as a non-profit organization, and became Mozilla Foundation. The foundation now creates and maintains the Mozilla Firefox browser and Mozilla Thunderbird email application, among other software. The Mozilla trademark is held by the Mozilla Foundation as of 2006.

After a series of lengthy pre-1.0 cycles, Mozilla 1.0 was released on June 5, 2002.

For example, when it is said that a website is usable by Mozilla browsers, it means that it is usable by Mozilla Suite, Firefox, Camino, Netscape 6, etc. In some older Internet statistics programs, the term "Netscape 5.x" is incorrectly used to refer to these browsers because the user agent string starts with Mozilla/5.0.

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.

The license was updated to version 1.1 and renamed the Mozilla Public License . 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.

Source: Wikipedia > Mozilla