Mozilla Application Suite

Mozilla Application Suite is a free and open source web browser and development platform.

By decision of the Mozilla Foundation, this Internet suite has ceased to be developed, and SeaMonkey is currently its successor.

History

Mozilla was originally the code name for Netscape Navigator. Following Microsoft's strategy of embedding its Internet Explorer browser into its Microsoft Windows operating system to dominate the market and win the "browser wars," Netscape Communications had the idea to strike back at Microsoft by releasing the source code of its Netscape 4.7 browser, and thus turning it into a free software project. A community of developers was created for the design of a new and improved browser focused on following the W3C web standards. Thus the Mozilla project was born, taking up the code name of Navigator. Eventually, Mozilla was rewritten almost from scratch after it was decided that a new set of XML-based cross-platform widgets called XUL would be developed and used as a base, which took considerably longer to appear than initially anticipated, Launching a high-quality version 1.0, translated into a large number of languages and multiplatform, on June 5, 2002.

Originally, Mozilla was developed primarily by Netscape Communications Corporation, more popularly known as Netscape, with input from numerous individual and corporate volunteers. Netscape used the project's code for its generation of Navigator 5 and 6.

After the abandonment of Netscape Communications, the Mozilla project has the organizational, legal and financial support of the Mozilla Foundation, a non-profit organization located in the state of California, United States. The foundation, was launched on July 15, 2003, to allow the continuity of the Mozilla project beyond the participation of individual volunteers.

On March 10, 2005, the Mozilla Foundation announced that no more official versions of this suite would be released. SeaMonkey is now the successor to Mozilla and is developed by a group of volunteers who make up The SeaMonkey Project.

As a curious fact, the developers of the Mozilla project have hidden metaphorical passages from the fictional The Book of Mozilla in successive versions of the browser. These verses collect, by way of biblical revelations, significant dates and milestones in the history of the browser.

Features

Far from being just a browser, it is a cross-platform development platform on which other applications can be built. Mozilla includes by itself an email client, a web page editor, an LDAP client and an IRC client, in addition to the browser. Also, it is expandable through XPI modules, which allows it to give it new functionalities that were previously unthinkable; for example there is already a calendar module.

Some interesting features of the browser and email reader are:

• Width through extensions.
• Increased convenience in navigation by using tabs to open multiple pages at once instead of windows.
• Very good security treatment Cookiessafe connections, images, etc.
• Advanced spam controls, to minimize the impact of unsolicited mail.
• Free and open source software: no rear doors.
• Failure to view: the database is universally accessible. Failures are corrected rather than concealed. Security failures are usually corrected in hours.
• Great portability: compiles in a variety of operating systems and architectures. There are binaries available for almost all systems, including Windows, MacOS, Linux, Solaris FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, IRIX, BeOS, OpenVMS and others.

The future of the Mozilla project lies in the separate components: Mozilla Firefox (web browser), Mozilla Thunderbird (email client and newsreader), Mozilla Sunbird (calendar), Mozilla Nvu (web editor). It was proposed to stop developing the Mozilla suite of applications, so some users, unhappy with this decision, made Mozilla reconsider to resume the project. Thus, in addition to the separate applications, Mozilla SeaMonkey is developed, which is the continuation of Application Suite.

• In Linux, it improves its appearance using GTK 2 instead of GTK 1, which was used in its predecessor.
• Incorporate regular updates of the application.