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In what has been described as "a huge milestone for the free software community," Mozilla.org Wednesday launched Mozilla 1.0, the first major-version public release of the source code which powers the Netscape 7.0 browser.

Mozilla.org was created by the former Netscape Communications Corp. (now an AOL Time Warner subsidiary) in 1998 to coordinate the Mozilla community's open source development of the Netscape source code.

"The Mozilla project has quietly become a key building block in the open source infrastructure," said Tim O'Reilly, founder and chief executive officer of O'Reilly & Associates Inc. "In addition to the open source Mozilla browser and the Netscape 7.0 browser, the Mozilla toolkit has been used to create additional browsers for platforms such as Linux and Mac OS X, instant messaging clients such as Chatzilla and the cross-platform Jabber client, and software development tools such as ActiveState's Komodo IDE."

Mozilla 1.0 consists of a full-fledged browser suite based on the latest Internet standards, and a cross-platform toolkit for developing Internet-based applications. The cross-platform suite was built on the Gecko layout engine and integrates a core set of applications, including a Web browser, e-mail reader and chat client.

"Mozilla.org is excited about releasing the Mozilla 1.0 code and development tools to the open source community, and providing developers with the resources they need to freely create and view the presentation of their content and data on the Web," said Mitchell Baker, Mozilla.org's 'chief lizard wrangler.' "As the browser has become the main interface between users and the Web over the past several years, the goal of the Mozilla project is to innovate and enable the creation of standards-compliant technology to keep content on the Web open."

The Mozilla 1.0 suite features full support for HTML 4.0, XML 1.0, Resource Description Framework (RDF), Cascading Style Sheets level 1 (CSS1), the W3C Document Object Model Level 2 (DOM2), and XHTML. It's 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. It also supports data transport protocols (including HTTP, FTP and SSL/TLS), multilingual character data (Unicode), graphics (GIF, JPEG, PNG and MNG), and JavaScript 1.5.

The toolkit also includes Mozilla's XML-based user-interface development technology (XUL), networking libraries, ECMAScript implementation and security and encryption libraries.

Additionally, Mozilla.org said the suite has been designed for easy localization into languages other than English. The first localized versions of Mozilla 1.0 will be Asturian, Chinese, Dutch, Greek, Estonian, Galician, German, Georgian, Greek, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Malay, Polish, Slovak, Sorbian and Ukranian.

While the Mozilla 1.0 components are all open source and free of charge, Mozilla.org has especially aimed Wednesday's release at developers, noting that the release "expands the range of developers who can write complex applications since Mozilla's architecture enables the creation of such complex applications by building upon the same technologies that are used to create Web content."

Mozilla 1.0 is available for free download at Mozilla.org's Web site.