Begun early in 1998, the Mozilla Web browser is one intended result of the Mozilla.org organization, a volunteer community of developers, testers, and other participants who have contributed over time to the actual development of the downloadable Mozilla browser and platform. Mozilla has been steadily developed and improved since the project's inception.

One of the more known and discussed Open Source projects on the Web, especially over the past few years, Mozilla.org's Web browser offers full or partial support for the latest Web standards; including HTML4; CSS1/2; WSC DOM1/2; and JavaScript 1.5. As an Open Source project, developers are allowed (and encouraged) to build Mozilla-like functionality, and especially the core "Gecko" engine for the display of Web pages and elements into their own browser applications. Netscape's latest browsers are examples of a vendor creating their own product based on Mozilla code. Though multiple Mozilla members are indeed Netscape employees, the Netscape and Mozilla Web browsers are developed and released independently (though the Netscape browser, obviously, relies heavily on Mozilla code).

In addition to Mozilla's Web browsing capabilities, a full-featured E-Mail client is also included, with support for multiple E-Mail accounts.

The Mozilla Web browser is provided both in source code form for developers, and in pre-compiled binary form for immediate use by surfers. Mozilla encourages those who download the Mozilla browser to report bugs found when using it via a Web accessible "Bugzilla" database used by the Mozilla.org development community to track and chart the progress made in relation to specific Mozilla issues.

Some of the key features in the latest release (1.2) include:

- Link prefetching; which allows Webmasters to add link "hints" into their Web pages that will automatically be downloaded by Mozilla during browser idle times (such as when the user is reading information within a displayed page). Thus, when the user hits a specific Web page, the browser can silently preload the pages that the user would be likely to visit next while the user is still reading the initial page.

- "After the fact" mail filtering allows users to run mail filters on messages that have already been downloaded.

- Desktop theme recognition. When run using the classic theme, Mozilla will recognize and utilize the native GTK theme (Linux) and use theme based HTML form controls (Windows XP).

The Mozilla.org Web site contains the source and binary downloads, as well as multiple informational resources pertaining to both to the browser and Mozilla.org development.

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