Mozilla 1.0 Steps Onto the Browser Stage It’s a Web Browser! It’s a Development Platform! It’s Free! Eric Grevstad
Mon 6/10/02 -- Remember last year, when people were spouting about how the launch of Windows XP would singlehandedly set the course of the computing industry, if not the world economy? Open-source software advocates have been hearing that kind of hype for several years, ever since the announcement of the Mozilla.org project to develop a free, cross-platform Web browser. Every bug and delay (and there’ve been plenty) was doomsday; the Gecko layout engine’s underwhelming debut in Netscape 6 was proof that open-source could never succeed; and so on. But oddly enough, the Mozilla.org volunteers kept going. And now Mozilla 1.0 has shipped.
Free for the download (10MB), Mozilla 1.0 integrates a Web browser, e-mail reader, and IRC chat client built to be the most advanced, standards-compliant products available, including support for HTML 4.0, XML 1.0, Cascading Style Sheets level 1, and the 23C Document Object Model level 1. It’s also a cross-platform toolkit for developing Internet-based applications that parse and render HTML and XML content (the potent new Netscape 7.0 is based on Mozilla).
But you don’t need to be a programmer or free software evangelist to appreciate the browser’s advanced features. The latter include a built-in pop-up ad blocker; pipelining that improves performance on both dial-up and broadband connections; tabbed browsing to switch between pages without having to switch windows; and bookmark keywords -- custom shortcuts to bookmarks, Google searches, or other destinations -- that simplify surfing and searching.
