1.1. Understanding Mozilla Product Names

The word Mozilla was originally a project name. Proposed by Jamie Zawinski, an employee of Netscape Communications, in the 1990s, Mozilla was also the name of the green reptile mascot for that project. It is a contraction of “Mosaic Killer,” coined in the spirit of competitive software projects. The Mosaic browser was the predecessor of the Netscape 1.0 browser.

Since then, the term Mozilla has because increasingly overused. At one time it stood for a project, a product, and a platform; and mozilla.org came to stand for an organization. Now, Mozilla is a generic term for a cluster of technologies, just as Java and .NET are. Other terms are also used for products and technologies within that cluster. Mozilla's ...

Get Rapid Application Development with Mozilla™ now with the O’Reilly learning platform.

O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.