Mork is a computer file format used by several

email client An email client, email reader or, more formally, message user agent (MUA) or mail user agent is a computer program used to access and manage a user's email. A web application which provides message management, composition, and reception functio ...

s and

web browser A web browser is application software for accessing websites. When a user requests a web page from a particular website, the browser retrieves its files from a web server and then displays the page on the user's screen. Browsers are used o ...

s produced by Netscape, and later,

Mozilla Foundation The Mozilla Foundation (stylized as moz://a) is an American non-profit organization that exists to support and collectively lead the open source Mozilla project. Founded in July 2003, the organization sets the policies that govern development, ...

. It was developed by David McCusker with the aim of creating a minimal

database In computing, a database is an organized collection of data stored and accessed electronically. Small databases can be stored on a file system, while large databases are hosted on computer clusters or cloud storage. The design of databases s ...

replacement that would be reliable, flexible, and efficient, and use a file format close to

plain text In computing, plain text is a loose term for data (e.g. file contents) that represent only characters of readable material but not its graphical representation nor other objects (floating-point numbers, images, etc.). It may also include a limit ...

Usage

The Mork format was used in most Mozilla-based projects, including the Mozilla browser suite,

SeaMonkey SeaMonkey is a free and open-source Internet suite. It is the continuation of the former Mozilla Application Suite, based on the same source code, which itself grew out of Netscape Communicator and formed the base of Netscape 6 and Netscape ...

Firefox Mozilla Firefox, or simply Firefox, is a free and open-source web browser developed by the Mozilla Foundation and its subsidiary, the Mozilla Corporation. It uses the Gecko rendering engine to display web pages, which implements current ...

, and

Thunderbird Thunderbird, thunder bird or thunderbirds may refer to: * Thunderbird (mythology), a legendary creature in certain North American indigenous peoples' history and culture * Ford Thunderbird, a car Birds * Dromornithidae, extinct flightless birds ...

. In Firefox, it was used for browsing history data and form history data. In Thunderbird, it is still used for many things, such as address book data (.mab files) and the mail folder summaries (.msf files).

Criticisms

Mork has many suboptimal properties. For example, despite the aim of efficiency, storing

Unicode Unicode, formally The Unicode Standard,The formal version reference is is an information technology standard for the consistent encoding, representation, and handling of text expressed in most of the world's writing systems. The standard, wh ...

text takes three or six

bytes The byte is a unit of digital information that most commonly consists of eight bits. Historically, the byte was the number of bits used to encode a single character of text in a computer and for this reason it is the smallest addressable uni ...

per character. The file format has been severely criticized by

Jamie Zawinski Jamie Zawinski (born November 3, 1968), commonly known as jwz, is an American computer programmer, blogger and impresario. He is best known for his role in the creation of Netscape Navigator, Netscape Mail, Lucid Emacs, Mozilla.org, and XScre ...

, a former Netscape engineer. He has lambasted the ostensibly "textual" format on the grounds that it is "not human-readable", bemoaned the impossibility of writing a correct parser for the format, and referred to it as "...the single most braindamaged file format that I have ever seen in my nineteen year career". In response, McCusker stated that the problems with Mork resulted from "conflicting requirements" and that he merely fixed scalability issues in bad code he "inherited". ''

The Register ''The Register'' is a British technology news website co-founded in 1994 by Mike Magee, John Lettice and Ross Alderson. The online newspaper's masthead sublogo is "''Biting the hand that feeds IT''." Their primary focus is information te ...

'' lambasted the Mork database with their article "Why has Thunderbird turned into a turkey?"

Obsolescence

The replacement system, used for storing all user configuration data, is called MozStorage. MozStorage is based on the

SQLite SQLite (, ) is a database engine written in the C programming language. It is not a standalone app; rather, it is a library that software developers embed in their apps. As such, it belongs to the family of embedded databases. It is the m ...

database. Beginning with Firefox 3.0, Firefox uses it for its history, form history and bookmark data. The storage engine was also included in Firefox 2.0, but only for use with extensions. Mork was completely removed from Firefox in 2011. Plans existed for Mork to be replaced with MozStorage in Thunderbird 3.0., but as of 2011 still used the Mork file format. As of 2012, SeaMonkey used Mork for at least its POP and IMAP mail folders indexes.

Software that handles Mork files

The original Mozilla MorkReader (CPP)

Mozilla-Mork (Perl)

mork-converter (Python)

References

External links