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Mosaic Browser's Functionality

Mosaic was a simple browser by today's standards, but powerful for its time. Mosaic had the ability to display:
  1. Hypertext providing links to other files in a nonsequential order created by the designer
  2. Electronic text in an enormous variety of fonts
  3. Text in bold and italic
  4. Layout elements such as paragraphs, bulleted lists, and quoted paragraphs
  5. It is mostly distinguishable by its support of multiple hardware platforms and the WWW HTML (hypertext markup language)
  6. Sounds and graphics GIF, JPEG)
  1. GIF: Graphical Interface Format: A format for encoding images (pictures, drawings, etc.) so that a computer can read the file and display the picture on the computer screen. The GIF format contains 256 colors. Photo-realistic graphic formats such as JPEG contain thousands of colors. The more color, the more realistic, but larger file size.
  2. JPEG: Joint photographic experts group. A compression technique used primarily in the editing of still images to be used in graphical arts and Web site development. It reduces the size of the images, allowing the images to load faster on Web sites. JPEG files are generally more photo-realistic than the GIF format, containing thousands of colors rather than GIF.

Mozilla and Firefox (Post-dotcom Browser)

The Mozilla initiative, in existence for more than seven years now, is the divine spawn of the Netscape Corporation. Several years spent in planning and restructuring have lead to some incredible products, including the Mozilla Suite, Firefox, Thunderbird, and many other smaller projects. Several of these projects are currently official releases, with Firefox being the flagship, standalone browser. The key to the Mozilla community is that it is now an official nonprofit international organization with many volunteers who help in debugging, hacking, and documenting the interface and features. The community of people who use and create for Mozilla is tremendous, and as large as it is, it still requires the assistance of all users, basic or experienced, to find and submit bugs that may come up or to submit requests for options that are currently not available. While you might hear a lot about the Mozilla organization, this book also covers the other supporting sites and individual initiatives, such as the XULPlanet, MozillaZine, MozDev, Extension Room, and Extension Mirrors sites. All of these help users and programmers support the Mozilla efforts by hosting web forums, extension homepages, and independent projects.