About Mozilla Firefox
The document is a brief introduction to the Mozilla project and web browser, a fast, secure web browser with excellent features.
Historical
Mozilla may not be a familiar name to most users but it is a very significant browser with a long history. Mozilla was the name of Netscape's first browser, back in the dark days of the Internet (that is, way back in 1994). In 1998, Netscape decided to release their brower's source code to the world and allow interaction between its paid software developers and the software community: this project was called the Mozilla project.
When Netscape opened its code to the public, it became what is known as an "open source" project. The advantage of open source is that in addition to the paid programmers already working on the project, thousands of interested software developers can find bugs, offer fixes, and even develop add-ons for the browser. This is one (of several reasons) that the Mozilla (and Netscape) browser is significantly more secure and customizable than its closed source counterpart, Internet Explorer.
Currently
The last version of Netscape produced was 7.2: now only the Mozilla browser releases new versions. In addition to the traditional Netscape replacement browser/email client/html editor/chat client (known as the Mozilla Application Suite) the project also produces Mozilla Firefox, a fast, lightweight, and secure stand-alone browser. Firefox is the browser component of the Mozilla Application Suite and is the place where new features are implimented first.
If you're interested, you can find tons of great info on the Mozilla Firefox project by stopping by the Firefox homepage.
Last updated: 10/03/06
