Mozilla was formed out of the ashes of the Netscape browser development team. After trying for the better part of a year to create Netscape 5 with the current Netscape code they gave up, threw it all away and spent another year creating the Mozilla suite (browser, e-mail, more). Most of the time was spent creating the Gecko rendering engine which is the heart of the web browser that actually draws the page you see. The front end of the browser (all the clicky clicky stuff like the back and home buttons) was done in a variant of Javascript they created called XUL. This all became Netscape 6. A while later, part of the Mozilla people started work on the Phoenix standalone web browser which was intended as a lighter/faster web browser for those who didn't want a full blown software suite. They changed the name along the way to Firebird and then had to change it again to Firefox when the Firebird database people got mad.
Most of this can be found on the Mozilla web site starting here:
http://www.mozilla.org/foundation
Printer-friendly format
Email this thread to a friend
Bookmark this thread
(1000+ posts)
Send PM |
Profile |
Ignore