Mothra is a web browser

Web browser

A web browser is a software application for retrieving, presenting, and traversing information resources on the World Wide Web. An information resource is identified by a Uniform Resource Identifier and may be a web page, image, video, or other piece of content...

 and Internet Gopher client for the Plan 9

Plan 9 from Bell Labs

Plan 9 from Bell Labs is a distributed operating system. It was developed primarily for research purposes as the successor to Unix by the Computing Sciences Research Center at Bell Labs between the mid-1980s and 2002...

 operating system

Operating system

An operating system is a set of programs that manage computer hardware resources and provide common services for application software. The operating system is the most important type of system software in a computer system...

. It is a very basic graphical browser and does not support FTP, Java

Java

Java is an island of Indonesia. With a population of 135 million , it is the world's most populous island, and one of the most densely populated regions in the world. It is home to 60% of Indonesia's population. The Indonesian capital city, Jakarta, is in west Java...

, Javascript

JavaScript

JavaScript is a prototype-based scripting language that is dynamic, weakly typed and has first-class functions. It is a multi-paradigm language, supporting object-oriented, imperative, and functional programming styles....

 or CSS

CSS

-Computing:*Cascading Style Sheets, a language used to describe the style of document presentations in web development*Central Structure Store in the PHIGS 3D API*Closed source software, software that is not distributed with source code...

.

History

Mothra was written by Tom Duff

Tom Duff

Thomas Douglas Selkirk Duff is a computer programmer. He was born in Toronto, Ontario, Canada and grew up in Toronto and Leaside. In 1974 he graduated from the University of Waterloo with a B.Math and, two years later, got an M.Sc...

 for the Second Edition of Plan 9

Plan 9 from Bell Labs

Plan 9 from Bell Labs is a distributed operating system. It was developed primarily for research purposes as the successor to Unix by the Computing Sciences Research Center at Bell Labs between the mid-1980s and 2002...

. It is named after the Japanese
horror-movie monster Mothra

Mothra

is a kaiju, a type of fictional monster who first appeared in the serialized novel The Luminous Fairies and Mothra by Takehiko Fukunaga, Shinichiro Nakamura, and Yoshie Hotta...

 - Tom Duff

Tom Duff

Thomas Douglas Selkirk Duff is a computer programmer. He was born in Toronto, Ontario, Canada and grew up in Toronto and Leaside. In 1974 he graduated from the University of Waterloo with a B.Math and, two years later, got an M.Sc...

 picked the name because Netscape

Netscape

Netscape Communications is a US computer services company, best known for Netscape Navigator, its web browser. When it was an independent company, its headquarters were in Mountain View, California...

's browser is called Mozilla

Mozilla

Mozilla is a term used in a number of ways in relation to the Mozilla.org project and the Mozilla Foundation, their defunct commercial predecessor Netscape Communications Corporation, and their related application software....

, a portmanteau of Mosaic

Mosaic (web browser)

Mosaic is the web browser credited with popularizing the World Wide Web. It was also a client for earlier protocols such as FTP, NNTP, and gopher. Its clean, easily understood user interface, reliability, Windows port and simple installation all contributed to making it the application that opened...

 (its progenitor) and Godzilla

Godzilla

is a daikaijū, a Japanese movie monster, first appearing in Ishirō Honda's 1954 film Godzilla. Since then, Godzilla has gone on to become a worldwide pop culture icon starring in 28 films produced by Toho Co., Ltd. The monster has appeared in numerous other media incarnations including video games,...

 - and Mothra is its Plan 9

Plan 9 from Bell Labs

Plan 9 from Bell Labs is a distributed operating system. It was developed primarily for research purposes as the successor to Unix by the Computing Sciences Research Center at Bell Labs between the mid-1980s and 2002...

 "counterpart". It is not included in the current Plan 9 version releases, and can be found in the /n/sources/extra/mothra directory on a Plan 9 system (usually the fossil

Fossil (file system)

Fossil is the default file system in Plan 9 from Bell Labs. It serves the network protocol 9P and runs as a user space daemon, like most Plan 9 file servers. Fossil is different from most other file systems due to its snapshot/archival feature. It can take snapshots of the entire file system on...

 server at sources.bell-labs.com is mounted at /n/sources/ (using the 9P

9P

9P is a network protocol developed for the Plan 9 from Bell Labs distributed operating system as the means of connecting the components of a Plan 9 system. Files are key objects in Plan 9. They represent windows, network connections, processes, and almost anything else available in the operating...

 protocol)).

Mothra has two UI "display" modes that can be toggled from a menu on right clicking: the first mode displays the current page's URL and title, the browsing history in form of a list of pages visited during the session and it offers a command line for input; the second mode removes all UI and displays the page in the full window.

See also

• List of web browsers
• List of web browsers for Unix and Unix-like operating systems
• List of Plan 9 applications
• abaco
  Abaco (web browser)
  Abaco is a web browser for the Plan 9 operating system. It is a graphical web browser with support for inline images, tables and frames. It has a true multiple document interface inspired by acme's interface...
  
  - Another popular web browser for Plan 9.

External links

• Plan 9 Web Browsers