NationMaster - Encyclopedia: Gecko (layout engine)

Gecko is the open source, free software web browser layout engine used in all Mozilla-branded software and its derivatives, including later Netscape releases. Written in C++ and licensed under MPL/GPL/LGPL triple license, Gecko is designed to support open Internet standards. Originally created by Netscape Communications Corporation, its development is now overseen by the Mozilla Foundation. Image File history File links Download high resolution version (1068x960, 243 KB) Summary I took this screenshot myself. ... Image File history File links Download high resolution version (1068x960, 243 KB) Summary I took this screenshot myself. ... Epiphany is a web browser for the GNOME computer desktop. ... Wikipedia is a multilingual, Web-based free content encyclopedia project. ... Open source refers to projects that are open to the public and which draw on other projects that are freely available to the general public. ... This article is about free software as defined by the sociopolitical free software movement; for information on software distributed without charge, see freeware. ... An example of a web browser (Mozilla Firefox running under Microsoft Windows). ... A layout engine, or rendering engine, is a software that takes web content (such as HTML, XML, image files, etc) and formatting information (such as CSS, XSL, etc) and displays the formatted content on the screen. ... Mozilla logo Mozilla Firefox is a computer term that has had many different uses, though all of them have been related to Netscape Communications Corporation and its related application software. ... Netscape, formerly Netscape Communications Corporation, was an American computer services company, best known for their web browser. ... C++ (generally pronounced /si plÊŒs plÊŒs/) is a general-purpose, high-level programming language with low-level facilities. ... In computing, the Mozilla Public License is an open source and free software license. ... The GNU logo For other uses of GPL, see GPL (disambiguation). ... GNU logo The GNU Lesser General Public License (formerly the GNU Library General Public License) is an FSF approved Free Software license designed as a compromise between the GNU General Public License and simple permissive licenses such as the BSD license and the MIT License. ... This page meets Wikipedias criteria for speedy deletion. ... Netscape Communications Corporation was the publisher of the Netscape Navigator web browser as well as many other internet and intranet client and server software products. ... The Mozilla Foundation (abbreviated MF or MoFo) is a non-profit organization that exists to support and provide leadership for the open source Mozilla project. ...

Gecko offers 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 [1]. Primarily it is used by Mozilla browser derivatives, such as Mozilla Firefox, Camino, Flock, SeaMonkey, K-Meleon, and Netscape, to render websites and the browser user interface (written in XUL), but it is used elsewhere as well. Gecko is cross-platform and works on a number of different operating systems, including Microsoft Windows, BSDs, GNU/Linux, and Mac OS X. An application programmatic interface (API) is the interface that a computer system, library or application provides in order to allow requests for services to be made of it by other computer programs, and/or to allow data to be exchanged between them. ... Mozilla Firefox is a free, open source, cross-platform, graphical web browser developed by the Mozilla Corporation and hundreds of volunteers. ... Camino is a free, open source, graphical Web browser based on Mozillas Gecko layout engine and specifically designed for the Mac OS X family of operating systems. ... Flock is both a web browser based on Mozilla technologies and the name of the company developing the web browser. ... It has been suggested that this article or section be merged with Mozilla Application Suite. ... K-Meleon is a web browser for Microsoft Windows. ... Netscape, formerly Netscape Communications Corporation, was an American computer services company, best known for their web browser. ... XUL (XML User Interface Language) is a user interface markup language developed to support Mozilla applications like Mozilla Firefox and Mozilla Thunderbird. ... A cross-platform (or platform independent) programming language, software application or hardware device works on more than one system platform (e. ... Microsoft Windows is a family of operating systems by Microsoft. ... BSD redirects here; for other uses see BSD (disambiguation). ... GNU (pronounced ) is a free operating system consisting of a kernel, libraries, system utilities, compilers, and end-user applications. ... The Linux kernel is a Unix-like operating system kernel that was begun by Linus Torvalds in 1991 and subsequently developed with the assistance of developers worldwide. ... Mac OS X (officially pronounced Mac Oh-Ess Ten) is a line of open source graphical operating systems, with proprietary higher level API layers, developed, marketed, and sold by Apple Computer, the latest of which is pre-loaded on all currently shipping Macintosh computers. ...

Gecko is generally considered to be the second most-popular layout engine on the Web, after Trident (used by Internet Explorer for Windows since version 4), and followed by KHTML (used by Konqueror), WebCore (used by Safari), Presto (used by Opera), and Tasman (used by Internet Explorer for Mac). A layout engine, or rendering engine, is a software that takes web content (such as HTML, XML, image files, etc) and formatting information (such as CSS, XSL, etc) and displays the formatted content on the screen. ... Trident (also known as MSHTML) is the name of the layout engine for the Microsoft Windows version of Internet Explorer. ... To meet Wikipedias quality standards, this article or section may require cleanup. ... Konqueror using KHTML to render the Wikipedia front page. ... Konqueror is a file manager, web browser and file viewer, developed as part of the K Desktop Environment (KDE) by volunteers and runs on most Unix-like operating systems. ... WebCore is a framework developed by Apple, and licensed under the LGPL, to provide an HTML layout engine for Mac OS X. It is one of the two primary components of the WebKit framework (the other being JavaScriptCore). ... Safari is a web browser developed by Apple Computer, Inc. ... Presto is the name of the current layout engine for the Opera web browser developed by Opera Software. ... Opera is an Internet suite which handles common internet-related tasks, including visiting web sites, sending and receiving e-mail messages, managing contacts, and online chat. ... Tasman is the name of the layout engine introduced with version 5 of Internet Explorer for Mac. ... Internet Explorer for Mac (also referred to as Internet Explorer:mac or Internet Explorer Macintosh Edition) was a proprietary and freely available web browser developed by Microsoft for the Macintosh platform. ...

Standards support

From the outset, Gecko was designed to support open Internet standards. Some of the standards Gecko supports include:

*The font, color profile, animation, view, and cursor modules are yet to be implemented and the filter and text modules are only partially implemented. The extensibility module is also implemented but is currently disabled [3] An example of HTML code with syntax highlighting and line numbers In computing, HyperText Markup Language (HTML) is a predominant markup language for the creation of web pages. ... The Extensible Markup Language (XML) is a W3C-recommended general-purpose markup language for creating special-purpose markup languages, capable of describing many different kinds of data. ... The Extensible HyperText Markup Language, or XHTML, is a markup language that has the same expressive possibilities as HTML, but a stricter syntax. ... Mathematical Markup Language (MathML) is an application of XML for representing mathematical symbols and formulae, aimed at integrating them into World Wide Web documents. ... XForms is two things: 1. ... SVG is also the IATA code for Stavanger Airport, Sola in Norway. ... Wikibooks XML has more about this subject: Managing Data Exchange/CSS In computing, Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) is a stylesheet language used to describe the presentation of a document written in a markup language. ... Document Object Model (DOM) is a description of how an HTML or XML document is represented in a tree structure. ... Resource Description Framework (RDF) is a family of specifications for a metadata model that is often implemented as an application of XML. The RDF family of specifications is maintained by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). ... JavaScript is the name of Netscape Communications Corporations implementation of ECMAScript standard, a scripting programming language based on the concept of prototypes. ...

In order to support web pages designed for legacy versions of Netscape and Internet Explorer, Gecko supports DOCTYPE sniffing. 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 the non-standard oddities of Netscape Communicator 4.x, however, some of the 4.x features (such as layers) are not supported. A screenshot of a web page. ... A Document Type Declaration, or DOCTYPE, associates a particular SGML or XML document with a Document Type Definition (DTD). ... The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is a consortium that produces standards—recommendations, as they call them—for the World Wide Web. ... Quirks mode refers to a technique used by some web browsers to maintain backwards compatibility with web pages designed for older browsers. ... Netscape Communicator was a proprietary Internet suite produced by Netscape Communications Corporation. ...

Gecko also has limited support for some non-standard Internet Explorer features, such as the <marquee> tag and the document.all property (though pages explicitly testing for document.all will be told it is not supported). While this increases compatibility with many documents designed only for Internet Explorer, some purists argue that it harms the cause of standards evangelism. A Technology Evangelist is a job title given to a person whos job is to assist organizations adopting new technologies. ...

History

Development of 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 widely considered to be inferior to the one used in Microsoft Internet Explorer. It 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 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. Dynamic HTML or DHTML is a term used for a collection of technologies, used together to create interactive and animated web sites by using a combination of static markup language (such as HTML), a client-side scripting language (such as JavaScript), the presentation definition language (e. ...

After the launch of the Mozilla project in early 1998, the new layout engine code 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)[4], eventually the Gecko branding won out. For a time, Gecko was used to refer to both the old NGLayout layout engine and XPFE (cross-platform front-end) — the new XML-based Mozilla user interface, rendered by NGLayout—but it is now used solely to refer to the layout engine. 1998 (MCMXCVIII) was a common year starting on Thursday of the Gregorian calendar, and was designated the International Year of the Ocean. ... A trademark or trade mark[1] is a distinctive sign of some kind which is used by a business to uniquely identify itself and its products and services to consumers, and to distinguish the business and its products or services from those of other businesses. ... The Mozilla Organization (mozilla. ... The Mozilla Foundation (abbreviated MF or MoFo) is a non-profit organization that exists to support and provide leadership for the open source Mozilla project. ... The user interface is the part of a system exposed to users. ...

In October 1998, Netscape announced that its next browser would use Gecko (which was still called NGLayout) 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 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). Mariner was a cancelled project to add performance and stability enhancements to the layout engine used in the Netscape Communicator web browser. ...

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 the exception of a few betas, Gecko was never used in the main Microsoft Windows AOL client. To meet Wikipedias quality standards, this article may require cleanup. ... CompuServe, (in full, CompuServe Information Services, or CIS), was the first major commercial online service in the United States, dominating the field during the 1980s and remaining a major player through the mid-1990s when it was sidelined by the rise of GUI-based services such as America Online (AOL). ... Software development stages Development stage terminology expresses how the development of a piece of software has progressed and how much further development it may require. ... Microsoft Windows is a family of operating systems by Microsoft. ...

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. July 15 is the 196th day (197th in leap years) of the year in the Gregorian Calendar, with 169 days remaining. ... 2003 (MMIII) was a common year starting on Wednesday of the Gregorian calendar. ... The Mozilla Corporation is a wholly owned subsidiary of the Mozilla Foundation that coordinates and integrates the development of Internet-related applications such as the Mozilla Firefox web browser and the Mozilla Thunderbird email client by the growing global community of open-source developers, only some of which are employed...

Future

It appears likely that Gecko will add support for some of the technologies developed by the Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group in the near future. The Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group (WHATWG) is a working group for developing new technologies designed to allow authors to write and deploy web applications more easily by extending the existing technologies. ...

One of the main initiatives in 1.9 will be an overhaul of the graphics infrastructure. Instead of using the platforms' API, Cairo will be used for all graphics outputs. This will result in improved 2D graphics capabilities and, via Glitz, acceleration using 3D graphics hardware. It will also mean that there will be a single rendering pipeline for HTML/CSS, canvas and SVG, so that SVG effects can be applied to HTML content. Because of Cairo, it will also be possible to output the graphics as formats like PNG and PDF, allowing users to export Web content in these formats. An application programmatic interface (API) is the interface that a computer system, library or application provides in order to allow requests for services to be made of it by other computer programs, and/or to allow data to be exchanged between them. ... Cairo is a free software graphics library with multiple backends that provides a vector-based device-independent API for software developers. ... Glitz is an OpenGL image compositing library. ... The canvas element is a third-party, non-standard extension to the HTML standard that allows for dynamic rendering of scriptable bitmap images. ... A PNG image with an 8-bit transparency channel (top). ... To meet Wikipedias quality standards, this article or section may require cleanup. ...

Additionally Gecko 1.9 Reflow code is being refactored (MozillaWiki article on reflow refactoring), because original design split between HTML and XUL turned out to be flawed and (among other things) is not able to pass Acid2 test. An example of HTML code with syntax highlighting and line numbers In computing, HyperText Markup Language (HTML) is a predominant markup language for the creation of web pages. ... XUL (XML User Interface Language) is a user interface markup language developed to support Mozilla applications like Mozilla Firefox and Mozilla Thunderbird. ... The optimal result for Acid2. ...

Gecko-based applications

Web browsers

The Mozilla Application Suite (originally known as Mozilla, marketed as the Mozilla Suite, and code named Seamonkey) is a free, cross-platform internet suite, whose components include a web browser, an e-mail and news client, an HTML editor, and an IRC client. ... Mozilla Firefox is a free, open source, cross-platform, graphical web browser developed by the Mozilla Corporation and hundreds of volunteers. ... AOL LLC (formerly America Online, Inc) is an American online service provider, bulletin board system, and media company operated by Time Warner. ... Mac OS X (officially pronounced Mac Oh-Ess Ten) is a line of open source graphical operating systems, with proprietary higher level API layers, developed, marketed, and sold by Apple Computer, the latest of which is pre-loaded on all currently shipping Macintosh computers. ... Beonex Communicator is a web-browser and email/news client based on Mozilla. ... Camino is a free, open source, graphical Web browser based on Mozillas Gecko layout engine and specifically designed for the Mac OS X family of operating systems. ... CompuServe, (in full, CompuServe Information Services, or CIS), was the first major commercial online service in the United States, dominating the field during the 1980s and remaining a major player through the mid-1990s when it was sidelined by the rise of GUI-based services such as America Online (AOL). ... DocZilla - Wikipedia /**/ @import /skins-1. ... Epiphany is a web browser for the GNOME computer desktop. ... Flock is both a web browser based on Mozilla technologies and the name of the company developing the web browser. ... Galeon is a web browser for GNOME based on Mozillas Gecko layout engine. ... To meet Wikipedias quality standards, this article or section may require cleanup. ... International Business Machines Corporation (IBM, or colloquially, Big Blue) (NYSE: IBM) (incorporated June 15, 1911, in operation since 1888) is headquartered in Armonk, New York, USA. The company manufactures and sells computer hardware, software, and services. ... To meet Wikipedias quality standards, this article or section may require cleanup. ... K-Meleon is a web browser for Microsoft Windows. ... Kazehakase (é¢¨åšå£«) is a web browser for Unix-like operating systems that uses the GTK2 libraries. ... ManyOne Networks is an Internet services company headquartered in Scotts Valley, California. ... Minimo (from Mini Mozilla) is a project to create a version of the Mozilla web browser for small devices like PDAs and cellphones. ... Netscape Navigator, also known as Netscape, was a proprietary web browser that was popular during the 1990s. ... Salamander is a web browser for GNU/Linux that uses the GTK+/GNOME libraries. ... Unix systems filiation. ... It has been suggested that this article or section be merged with Mozilla Application Suite. ... Skipstone is a GTK+ web browser based on Mozillas Gecko layout engine and intended to be lightweight with few dependencies. ... Sleipnir is a Japanese tabbed web browser, released by Fenrir & Co. ...

Other applications

* Also uses Gecko to render its entire user interface via XUL. Komodo is an award-winning, professional (IDE) for dynamic languages. ... Perl, also Practical Extraction and Report Language (a backronym, see below) is a dynamic procedural programming language designed by Larry Wall and first released in 1987. ... Python is an interpreted programming language created by Guido van Rossum in 1990. ... ChatZilla is an IRC client for Mozilla web browsers written in XUL and JavaScript. ... Democracy Player 0. ... It has been suggested that IPTV be merged into this article or section. ... See web feed if you are unfamiliar with the general concept. ... A typical web feed logo A web feed is a data format used for serving users frequently updated content. ... Liferea Screenshot Liferea is an abbreviation for Linux Feed Reader. ... An aggregator or news aggregator is a type of software that retrieves syndicated Web content that is supplied in the form of a web feed (RSS, Atom and other XML formats), and that are published by weblogs, podcasts, vlogs, and mainstream mass media websites. ... This article is about a communications protocol. ... In computing, a client is a system that accesses a (remote) service on another computer by some kind of network. ... The Mozilla ActiveX Control uses the Gecko layout engine to deliver a fully programmable HTML and XML rendering control for ActiveX developers. ... In programming, the Component Object Model (COM), also known as ActiveX, is a Microsoft technology for software components. ... Mozilla Calendar was an open source calendar and personal information manager based on the open iCalendar standard. ... Mozilla Thunderbird is a free, cross-platform e-mail and news client developed by the Mozilla Foundation. ... E-mail, or email, is short for electronic mail and is a method of composing, sending, and receiving messages over electronic communication systems. ... A newsgroup is a repository usually within the Usenet system, for messages posted from many users at different locations. ... Nvu (pronounced N-view) is a WYSIWYG HTML editor, based on the Composer component of Mozilla Application Suite. ... Songbird is a free media player that is currently in early development. ... WengoPhone is free software and is a VoIP service developed by the OpenWengo community under the GNU GPL license. ... IP Telephony, also called Internet telephony, is the technology that makes it possible to have a telephone conversation over the Internet or a dedicated Internet Protocol (IP) network instead of dedicated voice transmission lines. ... In computing, a client is a system that accesses a (remote) service on another computer by some kind of network. ... XUL (XML User Interface Language) is a user interface markup language developed to support Mozilla applications like Mozilla Firefox and Mozilla Thunderbird. ...

Contents

Standards support

History

Future

Gecko-based applications

Web browsers

Other applications

See also

External links

Contents

Standards support GA_googleFillSlot("encyclopedia_square");

History

Future

Gecko-based applications

Web browsers

Other applications

See also

External links

Standards support