Gecko

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Gecko is a layout engine currently developed by the Mozilla Corporation, known primarily as the layout engine of the Firefox web browser. It is designed to support open Internet standards and it is used by applications such as Mozilla Firefox 3, Camino, Flock (web browser), SeaMonkey, K-Meleon, and Netscape 9, to display web pages and, in some cases, an application's user interface itself.

Gecko offers a rich API that makes it suitable for a wide variety of roles in Internet-enabled applications, such as web browsers, content presentation, and client/server applications. Development originated with Netscape Communications Corporation, soon switching to the Mozilla Foundation for the Mozilla application suite, and now used in many applications developed by Mozilla Foundation and or the Mozilla Corporation, as well as many other open source software projects. It was also used in later Netscape Navigator releases.

Gecko is written in C++ and is cross-platform, running on operating systems including Microsoft Windows, Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD), Linux, Mac Xcode, Solaris, OS/2, AIX and OpenVMS. Its development is now overseen by the Mozilla Foundation. Gecko is free and open source software.

Gecko is the second most-popular layout engine on the World Wide Web, after Trident (used by Internet Explorer] for Windows since Internet Explorer 4, and followed by WebKit (used by the Safari web browser) and the Presto layout engine)used by the Opera (web browser).