Mozilla was the mascot of Netscape Communications Corporation and subsequently the Mozilla Foundation.
Its name comes from a portmanteau of Mosaic, the original name of Netscape Navigator, and Godzilla.
The mascot has varied in appearance, and was retired from active use in 2012. [1]
The name "Mozilla" was already in use at Netscape as the codename for Netscape Navigator 1.0.
Programmer Jamie Zawinski came up with the name during a meeting while working at the company.
The name stood for "Mosaic killer", as the company's goal was to displace NCSA Mosaic as the world's number one web browser. [2] [3]
Initially the mascot took various forms, including that of a helmeted astronaut or "spaceman", but the eventual choice of a Godzilla-like lizard which went well with the theme of crushing the competition, especially because of the similarity between the names.
This design rendered Mozilla in the form of a green and purple cartoon lizard, designed by Dave Titus in 1994. [4] [5]
Mozilla featured prominently on Netscape's web site in the company's early years. However, the need to project a more "professional" image (especially towards corporate clients) led to him being removed.
Mozilla continued to be used inside Netscape, though, often featuring on T-shirts given to staff or on artwork adorning the walls of the Netscape campus in Mountain View.
When Netscape acquired the website directory NewHoo in 1998, they rebranded it the Open Directory Project with the nickname "DMOZ" (Directory of Mozilla) due to its similarity to the Mozilla project.
A green and purple image of Mozilla was placed on every page of the site, which continued even after Netscape's disbanding when it was acquired by AOL.[ citation needed ]
The name "Mozilla" later became more prominent when it was used for the open source browser of the same name.
With the launch of the mozilla.org web site in 1998, the mascot was redesigned as a larger, fiercer red Tyrannosaurus rex .
The new design was by Shepard Fairey of "Obey Giant" and Barack Obama "Hope" poster fame. [6]
By September 2012, the mascot – referred to as "the dino" and "he" – had been "retired from active duty", removed from official Mozilla branding, and replaced by a "Mozilla" wordmark, all lowercase and set in Meta Bold typeface.
Subsequently, in July 2019, the latter had been replaced by "moz://a", in Mozilla's Zilla Slab Highlight typeface and within a rectangle of a tone or color contrasting with that of the lettering. [7]
Netscape Navigator is a discontinued proprietary web browser, and the original browser of the Netscape line, from versions 1 to 4.08, and 9.x. It was the flagship product of the Netscape Communications Corp and was the dominant web browser in terms of usage share in the 1990s, but by around 2003 its user base had all but disappeared. This was partly because the Netscape Corporation did not sustain Netscape Navigator's technical innovation in the late 1990s.
Netscape Communications Corporation was an American independent computer services company with headquarters in Mountain View, California, and then Dulles, Virginia. Its Netscape web browser was once dominant but lost to Internet Explorer and other competitors in the so-called first browser war, with its market share falling from more than 90 percent in the mid-1990s to less than one percent in 2006. An early Netscape employee Brendan Eich created the JavaScript programming language, the most widely used language for client-side scripting of web pages and a founding engineer of Netscape Lou Montulli created HTTP cookies. The company also developed SSL which was used for securing online communications before its successor TLS took over.
A web browser is an application for accessing websites and the Internet. When a user requests a web page from a particular website, the browser retrieves its files from a web server and then displays the page on the user's screen. Browsers are used on a range of devices, including desktops, laptops, tablets, and smartphones. In 2020, an estimated 4.9 billion people have used a browser. The most used browser is Google Chrome, with a 65% global market share on all devices, followed by Safari with 18%.
Jamie Werner Zawinski, commonly known as jwz, is an American computer programmer, blogger and impresario. He is best known for his role in the creation of Netscape Navigator, Netscape Mail, Lucid Emacs, Mozilla.org, and XScreenSaver. He is also the proprietor of DNA Lounge, a nightclub and live music venue in San Francisco.
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The National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) is a state-federal partnership to develop and deploy national-scale computer infrastructure that advances research, science and engineering based in the United States. NCSA operates as a unit of the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, and provides high-performance computing resources to researchers across the country. Support for NCSA comes from the National Science Foundation, the state of Illinois, the University of Illinois, business and industry partners, and other federal agencies.
Netscape Communicator is a discontinued Internet suite produced by Netscape Communications Corporation, and was the fourth major release in the Netscape line of browsers. It was first in beta in 1996 and was released in June 1997. Netscape Communicator addressed the problem of Netscape Navigator 3.x being used as both the name of the suite and the browser contained within it by renaming the suite to Netscape Communicator. It included more groupware features intended to appeal to enterprises.
Marc Lowell Andreessen is an American businessman and software engineer. He is the co-author of Mosaic, the first widely used web browser with a graphical user interface; co-founder of Netscape; and co-founder and general partner of Silicon Valley venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz. He co-founded and later sold the software company Opsware to Hewlett-Packard. Andreessen is also a co-founder of Ning, a company that provides a platform for social networking websites and an inductee in the World Wide Web Hall of Fame. Andreessen's net-worth is estimated at $1.7 billion. Critics of Andreessen allege he displayed a conflict of interest by effectively negotiating against Facebook shareholders.
The Book of Mozilla is a computer Easter egg found in the Netscape, Mozilla, SeaMonkey, Waterfox and Firefox series of web browsers. It is viewed by directing the browser to about:mozilla.
A browser war is a competition for dominance in the usage share of web browsers. The "first browser war," (1995–2001) pitted Microsoft's Internet Explorer against Netscape's Navigator. Browser wars continued with the decline of Internet Explorer's market share and the popularity of other browsers including Firefox, Google Chrome, Safari, Microsoft Edge and Opera.
Spyglass, Inc. was an Internet software company. It was founded in 1990, in Champaign, Illinois, as an offshoot of the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, and later moved to Naperville, Illinois. Spyglass was created to commercialize and support technologies from the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA). It focused on data visualization tools, such as graphing packages and 3D rendering engines.
Eric J. Bina is an American software programmer who is the co-creator of Mosaic and the co-founder of Netscape. In 1993, Bina along with Marc Andreessen authored the first version of Mosaic while working as a programmer at National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
A throbber, also known as a loading icon, is an animated graphical control element used to show that a computer program is performing an action in the background. In contrast to a progress bar, a throbber does not indicate how much of the action has been completed.
The World Wide Web is a global information medium which users can access via computers connected to the Internet. The term is often mistakenly used as a synonym for the Internet, but the Web is a service that operates over the Internet, just as email and Usenet do. The history of the Internet and the history of hypertext date back significantly further than that of the World Wide Web.
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The Netscape web browser is the general name for a series of web browsers formerly produced by Netscape Communications Corporation, which eventually became a subsidiary of AOL. The original browser was once the dominant browser in terms of usage share, but as a result of the first browser war, it lost virtually all of its share to Internet Explorer due to Microsoft's anti-competitive bundling of Internet Explorer with Windows.
Netscape Navigator 9 is a discontinued web browser that was produced by the Netscape Communications division of parent AOL, first announced on January 23, 2007. It was the ninth major release of the Netscape line of browsers. After AOL outsourced the development of Netscape Browser 8 to Mercurial Communications in 2004, Netscape Navigator 9 marked the first Netscape browser to be produced in-house since the Netscape 7 suite. It also saw the return of the classic Navigator name, which was previously used during Netscape's heyday between versions 1.0 and 4.08 in the 1990s. Netscape Navigator 9 is based on Mozilla Firefox 2.0.
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Andreessen recruited five other Mosaic team members from NCSA to design what, in house, they called Mozilla, the Mosaic-Killer.