

The Mozilla Organization was created in 1998 to create the next generation of Netscape and was registered as a not-for-profit organization (the Mozilla Foundation) in 2003. Mozilla was also the name of the Netscape mascot-appropriately enough usually represented by a humanoid-lizard, like Godzilla. The Mozilla project was borne out of the Netscape Navigator project Mozilla being a combination of the term Mosaic killer (which is what they hoped Netscape would be) and a reference to Godzilla.
#NETSCAPE NAVIGATOR FOR MAC OSX SOFTWARE#
Web browsing in the free software space is now based around two main camps, those based on the Mozilla codebase (Camino, Firefox, Mozilla) and those based on the KDE sourced KHTML rendering engine (Safari and OmniWeb) Mozilla Suite I’ll then take a very brief look at the quasi-free software browsers Safari and OmniWeb. I’ll primarily be comparing speed and functionality, but I’ll also use the opportunity to cover some of the issues that affect the browsers on individual sites. It is only the interface which is not free software.įor the review, I’m going to be taking a closer look at the features and functionality of the three free software browsers-Mozilla, Firefox and Camino, and what differentiates the functionality of these three browsers from each other. The latter are not strictly free software, but the core rendering engine on which they rely is. Projects based on the former are completely free software, with both the rendering engine and interface being a free software project. Hence the need for community-based projects where many people can pool their experience.Īs a knock on effect, web browsing in the free software space is now based around two main camps, those based on the Mozilla codebase (Camino, Firefox, Mozilla) and those based on the KDE sourced KHTML rendering engine (Safari and OmniWeb). Web browsers are a classic example of this-although the principles of web browsing are quite simple, making all of the components of a typical web page (JavaScript, different image formats, plug-ins, CSS etc.) work effectively is quite difficult. It is now much easier to develop software for the OS X platform (development software is included, instead of being an expensive addition) and this makes it both easier for people to get involved and more likely to take part in open source community projects.ĭespite the ease, there are still some areas of software development where the complexities of the application are too great. The use of an open source operating system as the core has in turn led to an increase in the use and availability of free and open source software (FOSS).
#NETSCAPE NAVIGATOR FOR MAC OSX MAC OS#
When Apple migrated the Mac operating system platform to Mac OS X, one of the key components was an underpinning based on the FreeBSD operating system.
