[K12OSN] Firefox v. Mozilla

Petre Scheie petre at maltzen.net
Fri May 13 13:42:50 UTC 2005


Just a clarification:

Mozilla is a suite containing a web browser, mail client, and HTML composer/editor. 
Some people decided that it's more efficient to break those pieces out into stand-alone 
apps, so people don't have to endure the overhead of pieces they don't want.  Thus, we 
now have Firefox, Thunderbird, and Nvu, respectively.  There is also Sunbird, which is a 
calendar program.  They are all under the umbrella of the Mozilla Foundation, and they 
share code where relevant.  The individual apps have proven to be popular enough that 
development on the Mozilla suite has discontinued.

This is one of the beauties of OSS: The push to have a standalone web browser came from 
people outside the 'core' Mozilla developers, people who wanted a lighter, faster 
browser.  So, they just took the Moz code and started what became the Firefox project. 
Lots of people don't particularly like MS's Internet Explorer, but only MS gets to take 
the code and create something different.  Not a good principle for schools, I should think.

Petre

Brian Skahan wrote:
> On 5/13/05, Sharon Betts <sbetts at msad71.net> wrote:
> 
>>Since Mozilla has been discontinued, do you know of any plans to replace
>>"Composer"?
> 
> 
> Sharon,
> 
> Take a look at Nvu a standalone gecko based WYSIWG editor.  Its just
> about to have a 1.0 release.
> 
> http://nvu.org iirc.
> 
> -Brian
> 




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