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9.6. Mozilla
The Mozilla project works on a set of integrated applications for Internet, that
are free and multiplatform, and the most notable products are the Mozilla
Firefox web browser and the Mozilla Thunderbird email and news client. This
set is also designed as a platform for developing other applications, which
means that there are many browsers that use Gecko, Mozilla's HTML engine
(such as Galeon).
The project is managed by the Mozilla Foundation, a non-profit organisation
that creates free software and is "dedicated to preserving choice and promoting
innovation on the Internet". For this reason, Mozilla's products are based on
three basic principles: they must be free software, respect the standards and
be portable to other platforms.
9.6.1. History of Mozilla
The history of Mozilla is long and convoluted but also very interesting, as it
allows us to follow the history of the WWW itself. The reason for this is that
if we trace all the persons and institutions that have been involved in the
development of Mozilla, then we arrive at the starting point of the Internet,
with the launch of the first complete internet browser.
As was the case with Apache's predecessor, it was the NCSA where the first
complete internet browser, Mosaic, was "born" in 1993. Many of the members
of the development team, with Marc Andreessen and Jim Clark at the helm,
created a small company in order to write, starting from zero (as there were
problems with the copyright on the code of Mosaic and the technical design
of the programme had its limitations see Speeding the Net: the inside story of
Netscape and how it challenged Microsoft [189]), what would subsequently be-
come the Netscape Communicator browser, which was, unarguably, the lea-
der of the market of internet browsers until the arrival of Microsoft Internet
Explorer. Apart from the purely technological innovation that the Netscape
browser represented, Netscape Inc. was also innovative in the way it managed
to corner the market. Completely contrary to what was held as common sense
at the time, its star application, the WWW browser, was available for free (and
could even be distributed with certain limitations). This approach, which was
completely unheard of in the corporate world at the time, caused a certain