Mozilla.org/Technology List

Technology Projects

Note: There is now a Technologies page on www.mozilla.org that narrowly defines what a technology is. If we'd like to develop a more detailed list like this below, we can but someone will need to drive this process.

• Accessibility -- The goal of Access Mozilla is to provide accessibility solutions (text-to-speech, magnification, high/low contrast themes, speech-input, onscreen keyboard, braille display support, etc.). This would create the first truly seamless accessibility solution for the internet. The solutions can be via 3rd party tools, extensions or built right in.
• Blackwood -- An attempt to better integrate the Java platform with the Mozilla browser. Blackwood consists of a series of Java-based extensions to Mozilla.
• CCK -- http://developer.mozilla.org/en/docs/Repackaging_Firefox
• Directory (LDAP) -- The Directory pages include Java class library source, C SDK library source, and PerLDAP source. Each of these libraries provides access to Directory Services via LDAP (Lightweight Directory Access Protocol). This project covers only the LDAP library, and not LDAP access from the mailnews project.
• DOM Inspector -- A developer tool used to inspect, browse, and edit the Document Object Model of documents - usually web pages or XUL windows.
• Embedding -- Gecko allows third party developers to use the same technology as found in Mozilla.
• Gecko -- The name of the layout engine developed by the Mozilla Project.
• Help Viewer -- Allows information to be shown to the user inside Mozilla.
• JavaScript -- A small, lightweight, object-oriented, cross-platform scripting language.
• Localization (L10N) -- The process of translating software user interfaces from one language to another and adapting it to suit a foreign culture.
• MathML -- Adds the ability to display the MathML language inside Mozilla.
• Mozilla Documentation Project -- Provides comprehensive, accurate, and up-to-date documentation and news about Firefox, Mozilla, and web development technologies.
• Necko -- A network library that provides a platform-independent API for several layers of networking ranging from transport to presentation layers.
• Netscape Portable Runtime (NSPR) -- Provides a platform-neutral API for system level and libc-like functions.
• [Network Security Services (NSS)] -- http://developer.mozilla.org/en/docs/NSS
• Penelope -- A project is an effort to build the Eudora e-mail client on top of Thunderbird and the Mozilla platform, while maintaining the Eudora user experience.
• Plug-ins -- The implementation of Netscape's Plug-in Application Programming Interface (API) within Mozilla.
• PyXPCOM -- Allows for communication between Python and XPCOM, such that a Python application can access XPCOM objects, and XPCOM can access any Python class that implements an XPCOM interface.
• Resource Description Framework (RDF) -- A family of specifications for a metadata model that is often implemented as an application of XML.
• Rhino -- An open-source implementation of JavaScript written entirely in Java.
• Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) -- An XML markup language for describing two-dimensional vector graphics.
• Storage -- A SQLite database API.
• Tamarin -- A JavaScript engine written in C++. It currently implements Adobe ActionScript™ 3 (a superset of ECMAScript Edition 3) and is embedded within the Adobe® Flash® Player 9.
• Venkman -- The code name for Mozilla's JavaScript Debugger.
• XML Binding Language (XBL) -- A language for describing bindings that can be attached to elements in other documents.
• XForms -- The future of online forms as envisioned by the W3C.
• XML Extras -- A module that implements XML functionality that is not part of the mainline XML infrastructure, like the XMLHttpRequest object copied from Microsoft.
• XML Web Services -- A collection of protocols and standards used for exchanging data between applications or systems.
• XPCOM -- A cross platform component object model, similar to Microsoft COM
• XPConnect -- The binding between XPCOM and JavaScript.
• XPInstall -- A technology for doing cross-platform installations, packaging, and software updates
• Toolkit -- A set of programming interfaces (APIs) built on top of Gecko which provide advanced services to XUL applications
• XSL Transformations (XSLT) -- The TransforMiiX module implements both a XSLT component for Mozilla, and a standalone commandline tool
• XUL -- XML User Interface Language, basis of Mozilla's cross-platform user interface

Archived Technologies

• BiDi -- A project to enable bi-directional text. This feature will enable Mozilla to render Arabic, Persian and Hebrew
• ColorSync -- The ColorSync project, sponsored by Apple Computer, attempts to manage color displayed from source html to destination browsers, compensating for various viewing conditions. It allows for pages to viewed as intended with the correct colors.
• Component Security -- Component security supports the addition of Java and JavaScript security to Mozilla components, mainly in terms of mobile code and the browser interfaces available to programs from those languages.
• Editor -- The editor project is focused on developing an HTML 4.0 compliant WYSIWYG editor. Composer is designed to be easy to use, fast and reliable; facilitating web page authors to make quick edits to their web pages. Composer is also the underlying editor within Mail/News.
• Footprint -- Information on work that's underway to reduce Mozilla's runtime footprint, both as a full-fledged browser suite and as an embeddable layout engine.
• Grendel -- In 1997, Netscape embarked on a project to rewrite Navigator/Communicator in Java. This project was cancelled before completion, but the mail/news component of it was nearly finished. Grendel is that mail/news client. Recently, work has been restarted on Grendel.
• Internationalization (I18N) -- The group responsible for making it possible for Mozilla to deal with various writing systems.
• Mail/News -- A project focused on developing a new application based on new mozilla technologies such as XPFE, XPCOM and RDF. We're bringing over most of our features for POP, SMTP, IMAP, NNTP, as well as making some key improvements.
• Mozbot -- A modular IRC bot.
• Network Security Services for Java (JSS) -- A Java interface to NSS that supports most of the security standards and encryption technologies supported by NSS. JSS also provides a pure Java interface for ASN.1 types and BER/DER encoding.
• Open JVM Integration (OJI) -- A project to extend the plug-in architecture to allow Java virtual machines to be plugged into Mozilla-based browser releases.
• Performance -- The Performance project is an umbrella for many small features and enhancements that are intended to make Mozilla the fastest browser around.
• Personal Security Manager (PSM) -- A set of libraries that perform cryptographic operations on behalf of a client application.
• PKCS #11 Conformance Testing -- Test suites designed to test PKCS #11 implementations.
• Platform for Privacy Preferences (P3P) -- An implementation of the W3C P3P specification.
• Ports -- Many different groups are planning ports of Mozilla to new platforms and toolkits. The Ports page list all of the known, active porting projects.
• Search -- The internet search component provides support for aggregating search results (via RDF) from one or multiple search engines and is used by the sidebar's "Search" panel.
• SilentDownload -- SilentDownload is a background transfer method that allows files to be downloaded to the users machine without interfering with their network performance. SilentDownload does this by only downloading while the network library is not busy. In this way, users can "silently download" large files over a period of time and be notified when the file transfer is complete.
• SQL Support -- The SQL support allows to query and update relational databases directly from JavaScript and also integrates well with the Mozilla UI.
• Technology Evangelism -- Mozilla Technology Evangelism actively promotes Mozilla as the premier Internet client technology in the world. It accomplishes its mission through working within the mozilla.org community to develop working examples, author documentation, perform general education, and educate Web site authors through one-on-one contacts.
• Unix -- Unix Front End. GTK 1.1, Linux/glibc2 is the reference developer platform. Support for other OS's and toolkits also exists.
• User Interface -- The user interface for Mozilla has a new look and feel. Check out the list of available UI specifications for details.
• XPNet -- XPNet is a cross-platform, lightweight download library used by the native installers. It has support for HTTP/1.1, FTP, pause/resume/cancel and HTTP proxies.
• Xprint -- Very advanced print module for Unix/Linux which supports automatic printer and printer feature lookup, TrueType font support, support for international printing (including languages and scripts like Arabic, Chinese, Cyrillic, Greek, Hebrew, Indic (Devanagari, Tamil, etc.), Japanese, Korean, Polish, etc.) and MathML.