Archive of UserLand's first discussion group, started October 5, 1998.

Mozilla is not a browser

Author:cameron@alphanumerica.com
Posted:4/12/2000; 7:51:51 AM
Topic:Mozilla is not a browser
Msg #:16104
Prev/Next:16103 / 16105

This is correct. Mozilla is more like an application platform that runs on multiple operating systems. Instead of thinking of Mozilla as an application like a web browser, think of it as a set of tools that lets you build lots of different web-enabled applications. You can use Mozilla to build web applications that take advantage of the web-centric nature of Mozilla.

This is why there is so much confusion between what Mozilla is and what Netscape 6 PR1 is. Netscape 6 PR1 is simply a web browser that uses Mozilla as its source code.

It's also true that Mozilla [the source code] has a web browser component called Mozilla. This is confusing since the names are exactly the same.

To understand why Mozilla is generating so much excitemtnt in the developer community, you need to stop thinking of Mozilla as just simply a web browser and start thinking of it as a development environment.

My co-worker, David Boswell, coined the new phrase "Application Virtual Machine" to explain what Mozilla actually is. Much like the concept of the Java Virtual Machine, Mozilla uses a cross-platform set of code that behaves and operates identically across all OS platforms it has been ported to. This allows developers to write their code ony once and run it on any OS platform that has a Mozilla port. This is true "write once, run anywhere" development.

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