Mozilla 1.0, Right on Time

Mozilla.org has officially released the 1.0 version of Mozilla, which, of course, includes the Gecko rendering engine.

Since 1998, when Netscape opened up the source code to allow development of a new browser, through the aquisition of Netscape by AOL in 1999, followed by the release of Netscape 6.0 (built on beta versions of Mozilla) two and a half years after the Mozilla project was launched, the entire project has been alternately assaulted for taking way too long and being too buggy and praised for holding up standards and open source as an ideal.

Most recently, AOL released the first Netscape 7 Preview Release (no telling how many more there may be), although that happened before the release of Mozilla 1.0. Most likely, the final 7.0 release will be based on Mozilla 1.0.

Of course, with AOL now testing Netscape in CompuServe, threatening to deploy it to the AOL service, and given that Mozilla is open source, it will be interesting to see how this release impacts the suit AOL Time Warner has filed against Microsoft for strong-arm browser practices. While this release itself isn’t going to change the state of the browser wars overnight, it’s an awfully big symbol to be held up in court.

Check out some of the articles on Mozilla here at evolt.org.

Features

The following is pulled from a release over on MozillaZine.org that trumpets the arrival of Mozilla 1.0. After all, they say it better than I.

Mozilla 1.0 features full support for HTML 4.0, XML 1.0, Resource Description Framework (RDF), Cascading Style Sheets level 1 (CSS1), and the W3C Document Object Model level 1 (DOM1). Mozilla 1.0 also has the industry’s best support for Cascading Style Sheets Level 2 (CSS2), the Document Object Model Level 2 (DOM2), and XHTML. Standards support also includes XML data exchange and manipulation of XML documents with SOAP 1.1, XSLT, XPath 1.0, and FIXptr, as well as support for display of mathematical equations using MathML. Finally, it features a solid foundation of support for data transport protocols (HTTP, FTP, and SSL/TLS), multilingual character data (Unicode), graphics (GIF, JPEG, PNG and MNG) and the latest version of the world’s most popular scripting language, JavaScript 1.5.

Further, Mozilla has been designed for easy localization into languages other than English, and localized versions of Mozilla 1.0 will be available in the following languages (with more to follow): Asturian, Chinese, Dutch, Estonian, Galician, German, Georgian, Greek, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Malay, Polish, Slovak, Serbian and Ukrainian.

Platforms

Mozilla 1.0 is available for the following platforms, so go try to download it over there:

• Win32
• MacOS 8.5, 8.6, 9.x
• MacOS X
• Linux
• BSD/OS (bsdi)
• FreeBSD
• OpenVMS
• OS/2
• Tru64 Unix

Ports are in the works for the following platforms:

• MacOS X using Carbon instad of Cocoa
• BeOS
• Irix
• The Qt toolkit, a Unix front-end
• A pure Java version
• Amiga DE (Digital Environment)
• Acorn RISC OS

Future

I’m taking bets on when the 1.1 release comes out…