Categories: Press Releases

Mozilla.org launches Mozilla 1.0

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. – June 5, 2002 – Mozilla.org, the organization  that coordinates Mozilla open-source development and provides services  to assist the Mozilla community, today announced the release of Mozilla 1.0,  the first major-version public release of the Mozilla software. A full-fledged browser suite based on the latest Internet standards as well as a  cross-platform toolkit, Mozilla 1.0 is targeted at the developer community  and enables the creation of Internet-based applications. Mozilla 1.0 was  developed in an open source environment and built by harnessing the creative  power of thousands of programmers and tens of thousands of testers on the  Internet, incorporating their best enhancements.

Built on the Gecko layout engine, Mozilla 1.0 is cross-platform and  integrates a core set of applications that allow users to access the  capabilities of the Web, including a web browser, an email reader and a  chat client. Gecko is the core browser component in Mozilla 1.0 and was  developed as part of the mozilla.org open source project; it is freely  available for inclusion in third party products. Mozilla 1.0 uses Gecko  to deliver the most advanced, standards-compliant browser across platforms;  the ease of embedding Gecko brings the same power to desktop applications  as well as devices. The release of Mozilla 1.0 signals a new level of  compatibility and maturity of the programming interfaces provided by Gecko,  and paves the way for the arrival of new Gecko-based products.

In addition, Mozilla 1.0 is a cross-platform toolkit for developing  Internet-based applications. By offering a set of components that can be  used in a wide range of applications, are all open source, free of charge  and have been tested through their use in Mozilla 1.0’s end-user applications, Mozilla 1.0 enables developers to build applications for a cross-platform,  network-centric world. Mozilla 1.0 also expands the range of developers who  can write complex applications since Mozilla’s architecture enables the  creation of such complex applications by building upon the same technologies  that are used to create web content. For instance, Gecko displays web content  on the user’s screen and parses and renders HTML and XML content, and this  ability to understand and display HTML and XML is valuable in numerous  applications beyond the browser. In addition, Mozilla’s cross-platform  component implementation, Mozilla’s cross-platform XML-based user-interface  development technology (“XUL”), its networking libraries, its ECMAScript  (JavaScript) implementation, and its security and encryption libraries are  all part of the Mozilla 1.0 cross-platform toolkit for application  development.

“Mozilla.org is excited about releasing the Mozilla 1.0 code and development  tools to the open source community, and providing developers with the  resources they need to freely create and view the presentation of their  content and data on the Web,” said Mitchell Baker, Chief Lizard Wrangler at  mozilla.org. “As the browser has become the main interface between users and  the Web over the past several years, the goal of the Mozilla project is to  innovate and enable the creation of standards-compliant technology to keep  content on the Web open. As more and more programmers and companies are  embracing Mozilla as a strategic technology, Mozilla 1.0 signals the advent  of even further dissemination and adoption of open source and standards-based  software across the Web.”

“The Mozilla project has quietly become a key building block in the open  source infrastructure. In addition to the open source Mozilla browser and  the Netscape 7.0 browser, the Mozilla toolkit has been used to create  additional browsers for platforms such as Linux and Mac OS X, instant  messaging clients such as Chatzilla and the cross-platform Jabber client,  and software development tools such as ActiveState’s Komodo IDE,” said  Tim O’Reilly, Founder and CEO, O’Reilly & Associates, Inc. “Moreover, there  are over 70 distinct projects hosted at mozdev.org, the community site for  Mozilla derivatives. This industry-wide momentum ought to be considered a  major success in anyone’s book.”

“The release of Mozilla 1.0 represents a huge milestone for the free  software community.  From browser technology to software development tools,  the Mozilla project has had an enormous impact on open source development,”  said Nat Friedman, Vice President of Product Development at Ximian Inc.  “Most importantly, Mozilla 1.0 is a key part of an industrial-strength open  source desktop.”  “The launch of Mozilla 1.0 is a key event for embedders across the Web, it  gives us a stable platform to develop upon in addition to guaranteed APIs to  build applications with,” added Philip Langdale, Mozilla interfacing code  maintainer for the Galeon web browser project. “We would like to congratulate  the entire mozilla.org team for producing such an outstanding product, as  key open source projects including Galeon would not have reached this level  of quality or maturity without their hard work.”

By virtue of embedding Gecko, Mozilla 1.0 and products based on Mozilla code  support more web standards, more deeply, more consistently across more  platforms than any others. Mozilla 1.0 features full support for HTML 4.0,  XML 1.0, Resource Description Framework (RDF), Cascading Style Sheets level 1  (CSS1), and the W3C Document Object Model level 1 (DOM1). Mozilla 1.0 also  has the industry’s best support for Cascading Style Sheets Level 2 (CSS2),  the Document Object Model Level 2 (DOM2), and XHTML. Standards support also  includes XML data exchange and manipulation of XML documents with SOAP 1.1,  XSLT, XPath 1.0, and FIXptr, as well as support for display of mathematical  equations using MathML. Finally, it features a solid foundation of support  for data transport protocols (HTTP, FTP, and SSL/TLS), multilingual character  data (Unicode), graphics (GIF, JPEG, PNG and MNG) and the latest version of  the world’s most popular scripting language, JavaScript 1.5.

Further, Mozilla has been designed for easy localization into languages  other than English, and localized versions of Mozilla 1.0 will be available  in the following languages (with more to follow): Asturian, Chinese, Dutch,  Estonian, Galician, German, Georgian, Greek, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese,  Malay, Polish, Slovak, Sorbian and Ukrainian. (For further details, please  visit http://www.mozilla.org/projects/l10n/mlp_status.html).

Mozilla 1.0 is available for free download at: http://www.mozilla.org/. For  additional information on Mozilla 1.0, please visit mozilla.org for the  Mozilla 1.0 Guide.

Mozilla will celebrate the release of Mozilla 1.0 with a party at the DNA  Lounge in San Francisco at 8pm on Wednesday, June 12, 2002. Details are  available at http://mozilla.org/party/2002/flyer.html.  Additional parties  are also being planned by Mozilla participants at 126 locations worldwide.  Information on these parties can be found at: http://www.schnitzer.at/mozparty/

About Mozilla.org

Mozilla.org (www.mozilla.org) is the group that exists to make Mozilla a  successful open source project; it supports the entire Mozilla community.  Mozilla.org provides a central point of contact and community for those  interested in using or improving the Mozilla code base. Mozilla.org provides  Open-Source Internet client software that includes a browser, mail and news  functionality, and a toolkit for developing Web-based applications. Mozilla’s  code is designed for performance and portability, features industry-leading  standards-support, and makes extensive use of XUL (Extensible User-interface  Language) as an easy-to-use interface programming tool. Mozilla.org receives  code and contributions from both individual volunteers and from commercial  entities which use Mozilla code as a foundation for product releases.  Mozilla.org was founded by Netscape Communications Corporation.

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Mozilla and the Mozilla logo are trademarks of mozilla.org.

Press contact:
Catherine Corre
Corre@mozilla.org