Mozilla

Open source; $0

Final Version: 1.7.13 (April 27, 2006) / 1.2.1 (December 3, 2002)

Mozilla was the original name for Netscape Navigator, back when it was first being developed in 1994 by Marc Andreesen and his friends from the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA - the people who developed Mosaic, the world's first graphical web browser). The name was supposed to imply a supercharged, "Godzilla" version of Mosaic; Mozilla was forced to change its name to Netscape when the people at NCSA threatened to sue over trademark infringement. Behind the scenes, though, Netscape Navigator and Communicator have always been known as Mozilla; type "about:mozilla" into the "Location" field of any version of those browsers and you'll see evidence of that.

In the early 21st century, with the "Mosaic"-inspired name no longer an issue, Mozilla became the name of the open source project upon which the Netscape series of browsers was based. Continuously developed by programmers around the world rather than by just a handful at a large corporation, it changed constantly, and improved all the time.

Today, however, Mozilla is no longer under development, at least under the "Mozilla" moniker. The primary components of Mozilla - its web browser and email/Usenet client - were broken off into separate, optimized development efforts, known respectively as Firefox and Thunderbird. The combined application suite has, as of early 2006, been reincarnated as SeaMonkey, which I will be adding to the Orchard soon.

Nonetheless, I include Mozilla here for historic purposes, since people will still find it useful and functional for some time, and it represents one of the only opportunities for users of "Classic" Mac OS to access a more modern browser that is largely compatible with today's more advanced web standards.

While Mozilla 1.7.13 was a minor update to Mozilla 1.7 that added some security and stability fixes, version 1.7 made a huge number of feature and performance enhancements. The online release notes have the whole picture.

Mozilla is fast (once it's loaded, which can still take a while) at rendering web pages. Mozilla is a breath of fresh air, and while the interface elements seem a little slow compared to other browsers, pages render remarkably quickly. This latest release is more than worthy of your daily use. Two of my many criteria for determining a browser's usefulness are: 1) how long I keep it open for browsing before quitting out in frustration; and 2) how long it keeps itself open before crashing. Mozilla wins on both fronts. Download it and try it for yourself; I suspect you'll be pleasantly surprised.

FYI: If you use OS X and like Mozilla - but don't like the way it looks - you should proceed, posthaste, to download the Pinstripe Theme for Mozilla, which lets the browser breathe through a beautiful Aqua interface, just like all of your favorite OS X apps. Mozilla's just not complete without it.

Mozilla 1.7 requires a Mac OS X later to run (version 1.2.1 was the last "official" release for OS 9, although the Web and Mail Communicator Project has a modified, unofficial release of version 1.3.1 available for OS 9), and it comes with optionally-installable news, email, and IRC (yes, IRC; Mozilla includes an incomplete IRC client called "Chatzilla" rather than AOL Instant Messenger) components. The mail and news clients are surprisingly well thought-out and pleasant to use, although I will probably always maintain that it is better to use separate, dedicated email and newsreading software rather than taking a "swiss army knife" approach; the separate tools are still superior at what they do. (Personal note: this is why I actually use Firefox for my regular browsing rather than the combined Mozilla suite...for email, I use Eudora.)