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Netscape 6, the first Netscape release to incorporate Gecko, was released in November 2000 (the name Netscape 5 was never used).Īs Gecko development continued, other applications and embedders began to make use of it. 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. 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. In October 1998, Netscape announced that its next browser would use Gecko (which was still called NGLayout at the time) rather than the old layout engine, requiring large parts of the application to be rewritten. 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.

Netscape later rebranded NGLayout as Gecko. Originally unveiled as Raptor, the name had to be changed to NGLayout (next generation layout) due to trademark problems. At least one more major revision of Netscape was expected to be released with the old layout engine before the switch.Īfter the launch of the Mozilla project in early 1998, the new layout engine code was released under an open-source license.

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. 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 the screen as new data is downloaded and added to the page). History ĭevelopment of the layout engine now known as Gecko began at Netscape in 1997, following the company's purchase of DigitalStyle. Mozilla officially supports its use on Android, Linux, macOS, and Windows. It is free and open-source software subject to the terms of the Mozilla Public License version 2.

Gecko is written in C++ and JavaScript, and, since 2016, additionally in Rust. 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. 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). It is used in the Firefox browser, the Thunderbird email client, and many other projects. Gecko is a browser engine developed by Mozilla.