Gecko (stylized as ɢecko) is a browser engine developed by Mozilla . It is used in the Firefox browser, the Thunderbird email client , and many other projects.
34-409: Galeon is a discontinued Gecko -based web browser that was created by Marco Pesenti Gritti with the goal of delivering a consistent browsing experience to GNOME desktop environment. It gained some popularity in the early 2000s due to its speed, flexibility in configuration and features. The disagreement over the future of Galeon split the development team in 2002, which resulted in the departure of
68-685: A rich programming API that makes it suitable for a wide variety of roles in Internet-enabled applications, such as web browsers , content presentation, and client/server . Gecko is written in C++ and JavaScript , and, since 2016, additionally in Rust . It is free and open-source software subject to the terms of the Mozilla Public License version 2. Mozilla officially supports its use on Android , Linux , macOS , and Windows . Development of
102-468: A score threshold, which can eliminate the down-voted comments from view. In late 2007, version 4 was launched, which completely overhauled the backend of the website, and was followed by version 4.1 which added a brand new theme and look to the website. On February 12, 2007, managing editor Thom Holwerda published the 1.0 version of the OSNews Style Guide. This style guide is licensed under
136-593: Is a computing online newspaper . It originally focused on operating systems and their related technologies that launched in 1997, but is now aggregating consumer electronics news. The content is managed by a group of editors and the owner. As of 2014, its managing editor is Thom Holwerda, who joined in 2005. OSnews has been referenced by TIME , Ars Technica , Wired , Computerworld , LifeHacker , Linux.com , OMG! Ubuntu! and lwn.net . Wired described OSnews as "an alternative operating system Web magazine", and in 2011 Holwerda noted that "while
170-1000: Is also used by Sugar for the OLPC XO-1 computer, and is used as a complete implementation of the XUL ( XML User Interface Language). Gecko currently defines the XUL specification. Gecko is also used by the KaiOS mobile operating system, which is based on the discontinued Firefox OS . Products that formerly used Gecko include Pale Moon (now using Goanna ), Epiphany (now known as GNOME Web and using WebKitGTK ), and GNOME DevHelp (now using WebKitGTK ). Discontinued products that used Gecko include Swiftfox , Flock , Galeon , Camino , Minimo , Beonex Communicator , Kazehakase , Songbird , Sunbird (calendar) , MicroB , Nightingale , Instantbird , and Picasa for Linux. On Windows and other platforms, Gecko depends on proprietary compilers. After Gecko 2.0,
204-607: Is composed of several sub-projects. The Mozilla Azure project is a stateless low-level graphics abstraction API used in Firefox . The project has several objectives including: Azure will provide 2D hardware acceleration on top of 3D graphics backends. Firefox began using Azure instead of Cairo in 2012. It is written in C++ and used by Servo . The Azure name is an ode to the early Netscape founder James H. Clark and his earlier work at Silicon Graphics where workstations were often named after colors. OSNews OSNews
238-519: Is unsustainable" regarding the resources required to maintain it. Instead, they planned to develop a set of extensions for Epiphany to provide similar functionality. Even after development ceased in September 2008, the browser remained popular and in December 2011 was still available in some Linux distribution 's repositories, such as Debian 6 Squeeze , although it was not part of Debian 7 Wheezy . Galeon
272-584: Is written in the Rust programming language , also created by Mozilla, which is designed to generate compiled code with better memory safety, concurrency, and parallelism than compiled C++ code. As of April 2016, Servo needed at least several years of development to become a full-featured browser engine, hence the decision to start the Quantum project to bring stable portions of Servo into Firefox. Mozilla laid off all Servo developers in August 2020. The Quantum project
306-650: The Mariner improvements to the old layout engine) had to be abandoned. Netscape 6, the first Netscape release to incorporate Gecko, was released in November 2000 (the name Netscape 5 was never used). As Gecko development continued, other applications and embedders began to make use of it. America Online , by this time Netscape's parent company, eventually adopted it for use in CompuServe 7.0 and AOL for Mac OS X (these products had previously embedded Internet Explorer). However, with
340-633: The Netscape era, a combination of poor technical and management decisions resulted in Gecko software bloat . Thus in 2001 Apple chose to fork KHTML , not Gecko, to create the WebKit engine for its Safari browser. However, by 2008 Mozilla had addressed some of the bloat problems, resulting in significant performance improvements for Gecko. In October 2016, Mozilla announced Quantum , an ongoing project encompassing several software development efforts to "build
374-477: The alternative operating systems scene might no longer be the prime focus of OSNews due to a lack of activity in that field, it's still where our heart lies." Besides its main site, OSNews previously detected hundreds of mobile browsers and handsets and redirected them to a specially formatted cHTML version of the website at mobile.osnews.com. Eugenia Loli-Queru, the author of this script, open sourced it in 2008. The editors contribute original articles and manage
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#1732844812294408-486: The browser's initial author and several other developers. This event marked the beginning of the browser's popularity decline, which led to its discontinuation in September 2008. Some of Galeon's features were subsequently ported to Epiphany (now called Web ) – the descendant of Galeon. Galeon made use of Gecko's features including configuration options and standards support. Apart from that, Galeon had several features that were uncommon in browsers at that time: The project
442-538: The earliest being Netscape 6 and Mozilla Suite (later renamed SeaMonkey ). It is also used in other Mozilla web browser derivatives such as Firefox and Firefox for mobile and the implementation of the Internet Explorer -clone that is part of Wine . Mozilla also uses it in their Thunderbird email-client . Other web browsers using Gecko include GNU IceCat , Waterfox , K-Meleon , Lunascape , Portable Firefox , Conkeror , Classilla , TenFourFox . Gecko
476-648: The exception of a few betas , Gecko was never used in the main Microsoft Windows AOL client. On July 15, 2003, AOL laid off the remaining Gecko developers and the Mozilla Foundation (formed on the same day) became the main steward of Gecko development. Today, Gecko is developed by employees of the Mozilla Corporation , employees of companies that contribute to the Mozilla project, and volunteers. In
510-498: The experimental Servo project. Quantum also includes refinements to the user interface and interactions. Firefox 57, released in November 2017, is the initial version with a Servo component enabled. Mozilla dubs this and several planned future releases "Firefox Quantum". In 2012, Mozilla began the experimental Servo project , which is an engine designed from scratch with the goals of improving concurrency and parallelism while also reducing memory safety vulnerabilities. Servo
544-444: The foundation of Mozilla's next generation of mobile products based on a software library that makes Gecko reusable for Android, encompassing newer software development efforts to "decouple the engine itself from its user interface, and made it easy to embed in other applications". Firefox Focus 7.0, shipped in the same month, is the initial version introduced GeckoView, with increased performance in median page loading. Firefox Reality
578-554: The functionality of the Microsoft Windows version. Galeon was widely seen as one of the best Linux browsers available. The polls revealed the substantial usage share of Galeon, though its popularity was regarded as owing to lack of stability evident in Mozilla 's browsers. With the release of new version of the GTK+ widget toolkit, which was used to construct the user interface of Galeon,
612-416: The general public. At the time of Galeon's creation, the most popular Linux browsers, including Netscape and Mozilla , were large multi-functional programs. This made them slow to start and often impractical due to their high memory usage and processor requirements. Opera was somewhat faster, but it was proprietary software distributed in trialware and adware versions, both of which lacked some of
646-420: The layout engine now known as Gecko began at Netscape in 1997, following the company's purchase of DigitalStyle . The existing Netscape rendering engine, originally written for Netscape Navigator 1.0 and upgraded through the years, was slow, did not comply well with W3C standards, had limited support for dynamic HTML and lacked features such as incremental reflow (when the layout engine rearranges elements on
680-631: The next-generation web engine for Firefox users". It included numerous improvements to Gecko, taken from the experimental Servo project. Firefox 57, also known as "Firefox Quantum", first shipping in November 2017, is the initial version with major components from the Quantum/Servo projects enabled. These include increased performance in the CSS and GPU rendering components. Additional components will be merged from Servo to Gecko incrementally in future versions. In September 2018, Mozilla announced GeckoView,
714-411: The non-standard oddities of Netscape Communicator 4.x; however, some of the 4.x features (such as layers ) are not supported. Gecko also has limited support for some non-standard Internet Explorer features, such as the marquee element and the document.all property (though pages explicitly testing for document.all will be told it is not supported). Gecko is primarily used in web browsers ,
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#1732844812294748-464: The number of preferences and simplifying the user interface would harm the project. In November 2002, as the result of several discussions on the topic Gritti made the decision to cease his work in Galeon and fork the project and started development of a HIG-compliant web browser he called Epiphany (now known as Web ). As Gritti no longer controlled the development of Galeon, the previous functionality
782-424: The screen as new data is downloaded and added to the page). The new layout engine was developed in parallel with the old, with the intention being to integrate it into Netscape Communicator when it was mature and stable. At least one more major revision of Netscape was expected to be released with the old layout engine before the switch. After the launch of the Mozilla project in early 1998, the new layout engine code
816-470: The standards Gecko supports include: Gecko also supports SVG . In order to support web pages designed for legacy versions of Netscape and Internet Explorer, Gecko supports DOCTYPE switching. Documents with a modern DOCTYPE are rendered in standards compliance mode, which follows the W3C standards strictly. Documents that have no DOCTYPE or an older DOCTYPE are rendered in quirks mode , which emulates some of
850-558: The submissions of news bits, articles, editorial comments and reviews that are submitted by readers. OSNews serves daily 275,000 page views on average (as of October 2005). Like other technology news sites such as Slashdot , it has a free user/ subscription model, and allows viewers to add commentary to articles. In 2005, OSNews published version 3 of its website, which includes an all-new commenting engine. Instead of reporting comments to moderators, this system now relies on votes. Readers can vote comments up or down, and readers can set
884-478: The team decided to write a new version of Galeon from scratch. At the same time the GNOME project has adopted its new human interface guidelines , which promoted simplicity and uniform design. The Galeon team had differing opinions on the new guidelines. The author and lead developer, Marco Pesenti Gritti, endorsed them and saw the rewrite as an opportunity to make Galeon simpler. Many other developers believed that reducing
918-444: The version number was bumped to 5.0 to match Firefox 5, and from then on has been kept in sync with the major version number for both Firefox and Thunderbird, to reflect the fact that it is no longer a separate component. Quantum is a Mozilla project encompassing several software development efforts to "build the next-generation web engine for Firefox users". It includes numerous improvements to Gecko, largely incorporated from
952-425: Was also built with GeckoView. In June 2019, Mozilla announced Firefox Preview as an ongoing project that focuses on building an Android web browser with GeckoView. Firefox for Android 79, also known as "Firefox Daylight", first shipping in August 2020, is the first stable release of that with major components powered by GeckoView engine. From the outset, Gecko was designed to support open Internet standards. Some of
986-490: Was praised for its customizability and speed, as compared to Netscape Navigator and Firefox , though Konqueror and Opera were still faster on older hardware. Galeon was noted for its session handling and crash recovery. In November 2002, OSNews conducted a poll to determine the most popular Gecko -based browser, which included several browsers for Microsoft Windows , Mac OS X and Linux , but didn't include Netscape Navigator and Mozilla Suite . The Linux-only Galeon
1020-604: Was released under an open-source license. Originally unveiled as Raptor , the name had to be changed to NGLayout (next generation layout) due to trademark problems. Netscape later rebranded NGLayout as Gecko . While Mozilla Organization (the forerunner of the Mozilla Foundation ) initially continued to use the NGLayout name (Gecko was a Netscape trademark), eventually the Gecko branding won out. In October 1998, Netscape announced that its next browser would use Gecko (which
1054-418: Was restored in subsequent releases and some new features were added, though development got slow after the split. At the same time the rising popularity of Firefox, its status of the default browser in major distribution and the overwhelming number of its extensions led to decline of Galeon's user base. Eventually the Galeon developers announced plans to halt development of Galeon, saying "the current approach
Galeon - Misplaced Pages Continue
1088-551: Was started by Marco Pesenti Gritti with the goal of creating a web browser that would be fast and consistent with the GNOME desktop environment. The first public version (Galeon 0.6) was released in June 2000. The first releases of Galeon were criticised for lack of such basic features as cookie and proxy support, though the browser added some features with every release. Version 1.2 of Galeon introduced many new features that drew attention of
1122-404: Was still called NGLayout at the time) rather than the old layout engine, requiring large parts of the application to be rewritten. While this decision was popular with web standards advocates, it was largely unpopular with Netscape developers, who were unhappy with the six months given for the rewrite. It also meant that most of the work done for Netscape Communicator 5.0 (including development on
1156-454: Was the second most popular, after cross-platform Firefox, at that time known as Phoenix . Critics noted Galeon's tricky plugin installation. [REDACTED] Media related to Galeon at Wikimedia Commons Gecko (software) Gecko is designed to support open Internet standards , and is used by different applications to display web pages and, in some cases, an application's user interface itself (by rendering XUL ). Gecko offers
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