Ghostzilla is a discontinued
open source
Open source is source code that is made freely available for possible modification and redistribution. Products include permission to use the source code, design documents, or content of the product. The open-source model is a decentralized sof ...
web browser for
Microsoft Windows
Windows is a group of several proprietary graphical operating system families developed and marketed by Microsoft. Each family caters to a certain sector of the computing industry. For example, Windows NT for consumers, Windows Server for serv ...
based on
Mozilla Application Suite 1.0.1.
It ran the browser inside the window space of another application (e.g. in
Microsoft Outlook
Microsoft Outlook is a personal information manager software system from Microsoft, available as a part of the Microsoft Office and Microsoft 365 software suites. Though primarily an email client, Outlook also includes such functions as Calen ...
), where the page was then made to look like the content in an email.
When moving the cursor out of the window, the browser subsequently disappeared.
History
Ghostzilla was originally launched as a
shareware
Shareware is a type of proprietary software that is initially shared by the owner for trial use at little or no cost. Often the software has limited functionality or incomplete documentation until the user sends payment to the software developer ...
project priced at US$19.95. The project then became
freeware and later open source. From May 2004 until January 2005, the project was removed from public view due to a copyright claim from
Mozilla. It later returned with code directly derived from Mozilla's open source, excluding the core proprietary library used to create minimal pages and
desaturated colors. It also came with warnings about the potential for misuse. In February 2007, the site was removed.
In March 2006, users of
Firefox had the option of installing a free
add-on called ''Ghostfox'', which aimed to mimic Ghostzilla's behavior in Firefox, although from June 2010 this extension was no longer compatible with Firefox 3.5. An open source project, ''InstaBrowser'', appeared in July 2007 mimicking Ghostzilla's ideas. By September 2009 this project was renamed ''Ninja Browser'' but was again short-lived.
Features
Ghostzilla is a browser which can be used directly from a CD or USB stick.
Ghostzilla changes the layout of the
web pages pending on the user's preferences as categorized into 6 different "stealth modes":
*As simple text (without any
CSS
Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) is a style sheet language used for describing the presentation of a document written in a markup language such as HTML or XML (including XML dialects such as SVG, MathML or XHTML). CSS is a cornerstone techno ...
, advertisement, or
pop-ups).
*Images are hidden or grayed out.
Users can change their preferences so that the navigation bar turns off.
If the cursor is placed outside the Ghostzilla window, Ghostzilla hides itself and can be viewed again by a
mouse gesture.
References
Further reading
*
External links
Last archived version of Ghostzilla site.Final release of Ghostzilla.The Ghostfox extension
at mozdev.org
mozdev.org was a website that offered free project hosting, and software development tools to the Mozilla community. Site hosted extensions for Firefox, Thunderbird and SeaMonkey and stand-alone Mozilla-based applications. It was free to set up a ...
{{Web browsers, desktop
2002 software
Discontinued web browsers
Free web browsers
Mozilla
Portable software