Aside from websites and browsers we see on the Internet, there are programs little-known to the general public but contribute greatly on how we look at the World Wide Web.  There are markup languages, for instance, that create codes how the text is displayed; there are also stylesheet languages that presents the structure of a webpage; and there are layout engines that take both of them and present it on screen.  On this guide article, we feature Gecko.

What is Gecko?

In computing, Gecko is a layout engine developed first by Netscape, and now by Mozilla Corporation.  It is being used in Firefox web browser and other applications Mozilla has developed such as Nvu and Thunderbird.  Because it supports open Internet standards, it is also used in applications outside of the Mozilla family such as Camino, K-Meleon, Netscape 9, and Flock web browsers.

Gecko is written in C++ programming language and is cross-platform, meaning it can run on a number of operating systems including Microsoft Windows, Linux, Solaris, OS/2, AIX, BSDs, and OpenVMS.  Gecko is the second most popular layout engine on the Web, after Trident by Internet Explorer, and followed by WebKit used by Safari and Google Chrome.

How Gecko began?

Netscape began developing a layout engine, which soon became known as Gecko, in 1997 to repair their existing rendering engine which was widely considered as inferior.  The layout engine was supposed to be developed in parallel with the old, then integrate it into Netscape Communicator by the time it matures.  Meanwhile, Mozilla has decided to try out the layout program being developed by Netscape, which at the time was called NGLayout.

In 1998, Netscape announced that its next browser would use NGLayout rather than the old layout engine.  This required large parts of the application to be written, which became unpopular among developers of Netscape because it meant they have to abandon some of the work done for Netscape Communicator 5.0. 

Netscape 6, the first web browser to incorporate NGLayout, was released in 2000.  Eventually, NGLayout would be renamed as Gecko and was also adopted in a number of applications of America Online, which by this time Netscape's parent company.

AOL laid off the remaining developers of Gecko and Mozilla Foundation became the main steward of Gecko development.