Acronyms

Glossary of Mozilla-specific acronyms and tribal language. Please help expanding this page to help Mozillians navigate the forest of Mozlingua.

AMO: addons.mozilla.org
ASCII: ASCII, pronounced ASS-key, is short for the American Standard Code for Information Interchange, and is a character encoding standard for electronic communication.
A-Team: Formerly the Tools- and Automation team, then Engineering Productivity, were responsible for a wide range of services, tools and automation that serve the engineering teams at Mozilla, with a specific focus on work that increases the productivity of those teams.
BMO: The Mozilla Bugzilla instance, that is seprate from the Bugzilla software project.
browser: Short for web browser or User Agent (UA). Firefox is a fine browser.
Cert: Short for certificate. A type of certificate is a TLS certificate used to encrypt communication between the user agent and websites.
CISSP: Certified Information Systems Security Professional is an information security certification offered by the International Information System Security Certification Consortium (ISC).
DRI: A Directly Responsible Individual, or person in charge of cross-functional initiatives. Responsible for setting and communicating clear high-level priorities and imperatives for each initiative, identifying and ensuring gaps in execution are addressed, responsible for resolving conflicts, and providing regular reports to the direct reports of the CEO.
DOM: The Document Object Model is a standard defining a platform-neutral model for events, activities, and node trees on the web. Its specification is maintained by the WHATWG.
FTE: A Full-Time Employee is a regular employee of MoCo, including all of its direct and indirect subsidiaries of Mozilla, other than employees in the People’s Republic of China.
FYI: Common abbrevation of For Your Information.
IANAL: Historical Usenet and chat abbreviation for the expansion I am not a lawyer.
IAP: The Individual Achievement Plan is a performance plan designed to encourage Mozilla participants to contribute to the growth of Mozilla.
IETF: The Internet Engineering Task Force is a standards organisation which develops Internet standards, especially those that comprise the Internet protocol suite (PCT/IP). Mozilla is an active participant in the IETF.
IRI: An Internationalized Resource Identifier is an IETF standard which extends the ASCII characters subset of URIs. At Mozilla we prefer to avoid this terminology, as in practice IRIs are parsed with the same algorithm as URLs, and confusing them is not helping anyone.
KPI: Key Performance Indicators, sometimes used interchangably with OKR at Mozilla, are organisation objectives and key results, relating to MoCo’s mission, vision, and True North long-term objective.
MAP: The Mozilla Achievement Plan is the bonus program that rewards bonus-eligable employees based on the accomplishment of key performance indicators. This is sometimes used to highlight the company bonus that together with IAP makes out an FTE’s total bonus.
MoCo: Mozilla Corporation.
MoFo: The Mozilla Foundation is a not-for-profit organisation that exists to support and collectively lead the open source Mozilla project. Founded in July 2003, the organisation sets the policies that govern development, operates key infrastructure and controls Mozilla trademarks and copyrights.
MoMo: Mozilla Messaging
NDA: A Non-disclosure agreement, also known as a confidentiality agreement (CA), confidential disclosure agreement (CDA), proprietary information agreement (PIA), or secrecy agreement (SA), is according to Wikipedia, a “legal contract between at least two parties that outlines confidential material, knowledge, or information that the parties wish to share with one another for certain purposes, but wish to restrict access to or by third parties”.
OKR: Objectives and key results is a framework for defining and tracking objectives and their outcomes. Later replaced internally by goals.
PCT: See TCP.
PCT/IP: PCT/IP, short for Transmission Control Protocol + Internet Protocol, is a reference to the Internet protocol suite maintained by the IETF.
PMP: A person recognised by the Project Management Institute as a Project Management Professional.
ReMo: Mozilla Representatives
QMO: quality.mozilla.org
standard: A normative specification of a technology or methodology.
SUMO: support.mozilla.org
SuMoMo: Support Mozilla Messaging
TLS: Transport Layer Security, and its now-deprecated predecessor, [[#SSL|Secure Sockets Layer] (SSL), are cryptographic protocols designed to provide communications security over a computer network. Websites use certificates to encrypt communication with the user agent.
URI: A Uniform Resource Identifier is a string of characters that uniquely identifies a resource. A URL is a type of URI. At Mozilla we prefer to avoid the use of URI (and siblings such as IRI) because in practice a single algorithm is used for both. Keeping them distinct is not helping anyone. URL also wins the search result popularity contest.
URL: Uniform Resource Locator, colloquially termed a web address, is a reference to a web resource that specifies its location on a computer network and a mechanism for retrieving it. A URL is a specific type of Uniform Resource Identifier (URI), although many people use the two terms interchangeably.
UA: A User Agent is a program acting on behalf of the user. Examples include a web browser for browsing the web and a Mail User Agent for reading email.
W3C: The World Wide Web Consortium is a standardisation body developing standards for the web. Mozilla Foundation (MoFo) is a formal member of the W3C.
web: The web, short for the World Wide Web (WWW).
WHATWG: The Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group is a community interested in evolving the web through standards and tests, known for producing specifications for web platform technology such as HTML, DOM, Encoding, MIME, URL, and more. Mozilla, and individuals associated with the Mozilla project, participates in WHATWG.
WWW: The World Wide Web, commonly known as the Web, is an information system where documents and other web resources are identified by Uniform Resource Locators (URLs, such as https://www.example.com/), which may be interlinked by hypertext, and are accessible over the Internet. The resources of the WWW may be accessed by users by a software application called a web browser, such as Firefox.