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 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. 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.
Gecko is a browser engine developed by Mozilla. It is used in the Firefox browser, the Thunderbird email client, and many other projects.
Mozilla Firefox is a free and open source web browser developed by the Mozilla Foundation and its subsidiary, the Mozilla Corporation. It uses the Gecko rendering engine to display web pages, which implements current and anticipated web standards. Firefox is available for Windows 10 and later versions of Windows, macOS, and Linux. Its unofficial ports are available for various Unix and Unix-like operating systems, including FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, and other operating systems, such as reactOS. Firefox is also available for Android and iOS. However, as with all other iOS web browsers, the iOS version uses the WebKit layout engine instead of Gecko due to platform requirements. An optimized version is also available on the Amazon Fire TV as one of the two main browsers available with Amazon's Silk Browser.
Mozilla Thunderbird is a free and open-source email client that also functions as a personal information manager with a calendar and contactbook, as well as an RSS feed reader, chat client (IRC/XMPP/Matrix), and news client. Operated by MZLA Technologies Corporation, a subsidiary of the Mozilla Foundation, Thunderbird is an independent, community-driven project that is managed and overseen by the Thunderbird Council, which is elected by the Thunderbird community. As a cross-platform application, Thunderbird is available for Windows, macOS, FreeBSD, Android, and Linux. The project strategy was originally modeled after that of Mozilla's Firefox, and Thunderbird is an interface built on top of that Web browser.
The Mozilla Foundation is an American non-profit organization that exists to support and collectively lead the open source Mozilla project. Founded in July 2003, the organization sets the policies that govern development, operates critical infrastructure, and controls Mozilla trademarks and copyrights. It owns two taxable subsidiaries: the Mozilla Corporation, which employs many Mozilla developers and coordinates releases of the Mozilla Firefox web browser, and MZLA Technologies Corporation, which employs developers to work on the Mozilla Thunderbird email client and coordinate its releases. The Mozilla Foundation was founded by the Netscape-affiliated Mozilla Organization. The organization is currently based in the Silicon Valley city of Mountain View, California, United States.
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.
Mozilla Europe was a non-profit organisation that promoted and deployed Mozilla products, like Firefox and Thunderbird, in Europe. It was founded on 17 February 2004 by contributors to Mozilla and other free software projects, and was an independent affiliate of the Mozilla Foundation with headquarters in Paris, France. It was disbanded on 17 February 2012 after Mozilla created an official structure in Paris in late 2011.
Beijing Mozilla Online Ltd., also called Mozilla China, is a limited company to help promote and deploy Mozilla products in mainland China.
Winifred Mitchell Baker is the chairwoman of the Mozilla Foundation and former CEO of the Mozilla Corporation, a subsidiary of the Mozilla Foundation that coordinates development of the open source Mozilla Internet applications, including the Mozilla Firefox web browser. She left the CEO role in February 2024.
Add-on is the Mozilla term for software modules that can be added to the Firefox web browser and related applications. Mozilla hosts them on its official add-on website.
The CZilla project is an official localization team of Mozilla Foundation. The project was founded in January 2003 as successor of CZilla.org.
The Mozilla Application Suite is a discontinued cross-platform integrated Internet suite. Its development was initiated by Netscape Communications Corporation, before their acquisition by AOL. It was based on the source code of Netscape Communicator. The development was spearheaded by the Mozilla Organization from 1998 to 2003, and by the Mozilla Foundation from 2003 to 2006.
The Mozilla Corporation is a wholly owned subsidiary of the Mozilla Foundation that coordinates and integrates the development of Internet-related applications such as the Firefox web browser, by a global community of open-source developers, some of whom are employed by the corporation itself. The corporation also distributes and promotes these products. Unlike the non-profit Mozilla Foundation, and the Mozilla open source project, founded by the now defunct Netscape Communications Corporation, the Mozilla Corporation is a taxable entity. The Mozilla Corporation reinvests all of its profits back into the Mozilla projects. The Mozilla Corporation's stated aim is to work towards the Mozilla Foundation's public benefit to "promote choice and innovation on the Internet."
Mozilla Firefox 4 is a version of the Firefox web browser, released on March 22, 2011. The first beta was made available on July 6, 2010; Release Candidate 2 was released on March 18, 2011. It was codenamed Tumucumaque, and was Firefox's last large release cycle. The Mozilla team planned smaller and quicker releases following other browser vendors. The primary goals for this version included improvements in performance, standards support, and user interface.
Mozilla Firefox 3.6 is a version of the Firefox web browser released in January 2010. The release's main improvement over Firefox 3.5 is improved performance. It uses the Gecko 1.9.2 engine, which improves compliance with web standards. It was codenamed Namoroka. In this version, support for X BitMap images was dropped.
Firefox OS is a discontinued open-source operating system made for smartphones, tablet computers, smart TVs, and dongles designed by Mozilla and external contributors. It is based on the rendering engine of the Firefox web browser, Gecko, and on the Linux kernel. It was first commercially released in 2014.
Mozilla is a free software community founded in 1998 by members of Netscape. The Mozilla community uses, develops, publishes and supports Mozilla products, thereby promoting exclusively free software and open standards, with only minor exceptions. The community is supported institutionally by the non-profit Mozilla Foundation and its tax-paying subsidiary, the Mozilla Corporation.
Lightbeam was an add-on for Firefox that displays third party tracking cookies placed on the user's computer while visiting various websites. It displays a graph of the interactions and connections of sites visited and the tracking sites to which they provide information.
Firefox Monitor is an online service developed by Mozilla, announced in June 2018, and launched on September 25 of that year.
The project that became Firefox today began as an experimental branch of the Mozilla Suite called m/b. Firefox retains the cross-platform nature of the original Mozilla browser, using the XUL user interface markup language. The use of XUL makes it possible to extend the browser's capabilities through the use of extensions and themes. The development and installation processes of these add-ons raised security concerns, and with the release of Firefox 0.9, the Mozilla Foundation opened a Mozilla Update website containing "approved" themes and extensions. The use of XUL sets Firefox apart from other browsers, including other projects based on Mozilla's Gecko layout engine and most other browsers, which use interfaces native to their respective platforms. Many of these projects started before Firefox, and probably served as inspiration.
