Dự án Mozilla đã được bắt đầu tháng ba năm 1998 với mục tiêu phát triển sự kế thừa cho Netscape Communicator của bộ trình duyệt. Hôm nay Mozilla được sử dụng bởi các nhà phát triển như một nền tảng cho việc tạo các ứng dụng mà có thể được cài đặt cục bộ hoặc chạy từ xa thông qua Internet. | Chapter 1. Mozilla as Platform The Mozilla project was started in March 1998 with the goal of developing the successor to Netscape s Communicator browser suite. Today Mozilla is used by developers as a platform for creating applications that can be installed locally or run remotely over the Internet. The difference between the Mozilla project s original goal of creating a browser suite and its current use as a cross-platform development framework is not as strange as it may sound at first. A web browser might not seem like an application development framework but it is. Browsers allow people using any type of computer to access applications such as Yahoo Mail to send and receive email Amazon s book ordering service or eBay s online auction house. Mozilla has expanded the idea of using a browser to access applications by building on some of the technologies that are used to create web sites such as CSS and JavaScript. A comparison of web technologies to Mozilla technologies is presented in this chapter and is helpful in explaining how the Mozilla project has turned into a platform for creating cross-platform applications. . Visualizing Mozilla s Front End In the beginning there were 3 front ends Mac Windows and Unix. Each took a suite of developers to maintain. Adding a new feature even just a button required 3 engineers to waste at least a day more often a week slaving away until the feature was complete. This had to change. This quote is posted on and describes how the Netscape browsers required a different set of engineers to create and maintain the code for the user interface even though the browser looked nearly identical on each different supported platform. For a company committed to creating an application that runs on a wide range of different systems using platform-specific code was a big waste of time. XPFE Mozilla s cross-platform front end was designed to solve this problem by enabling engineers to create one interface that would
