A Chatzilla Quick Tour/Demo

If you would like to take a preliminary look at ChatZilla, download Mozilla M16. After you start the Mozilla browser, just click on Tasks on the main Menu bar. Then when the Tasks menu drops down, click on IRC Chat. That will launch ChatZilla. Notice the box named "client" in the upper left of the ChatZilla application window with the yellow light in it. That's called a view button. See Fig. 1 below.

From your ChatZilla demo, then type /attach moznet in the edit (input) box. That will connect your ChatZilla client to the Mozilla Organization IRC network. Likely a box will pop up when you do that and it will ask you to type in and enter a nickname that you want for your name on IRC. Once you are connected to moznet, a view button labeled "moznet" will appear on the view bar next to the "client" view button.

Next you can join chat channels. For example try joining #Mozillazine by typing /join #mozillazine in the edit (input) box and then pressing the Enter key.

When you join a channel (#mozillazine in this example) a view button labeled with the channel name (#mozilline here) is added to the View bar. The #mozillazine view button has the yellow light since chat on #mozillazine now is displayed in the output (channel) window.

As people in the #mozillazine channel chat, you will see what they are typing in the output (channel) window. If you type something in the edit (input) box, you will see what you have typed appear in the output window as soon as you hit the Enter key -- so will everyone else in the #mozillazine channel.

(Tip: if you are not familiar with using IRC, a good way to get started in a channel is simply to type "hi" and then wait a while before you start chatting so you do not interrupt an already ongoing conversation.)

You can join several channels. Try typing /join #chatzilla to join the #chatzilla channel on moznet. After you join #chatzilla you should notice a "chatzilla" view button added to the View bar with a yellow light.

You can switch between #chatzilla and #mozillazine simply by clicking on the appropriate view button. Please notice how the colors of the lights change as you do this.

For more information and details about using ChatZilla, please see the "ChatZilla User's Guide".

Customizing Chatzilla

mIRC is one of the most popular if not the most popular Windows-based IRC clients. One reason is that with mIRC one easily can write their own popups, aliases, remotes, scripts, and so forth to automate many elements of his or her IRC experience. That easily can be done with ChatZilla too.

On the other hand the source code for mIRC is closed. So there are substantial limits on what one can do to customize mIRC. However, ChatZilla is part of the Mozilla Open Source scheme of things. Moreover, ChatZilla is a Mozilla Chrome package. That means you pretty much can customize ChatZilla just the way you want it.

Customizing ChatZilla is not all that different from Mozilla skinning. Please see our "MozillaQuest" tutorial Mozilla-skinning series and Creating A Mozilla Skin, Pt. 1 by Chris Nelson for more about that. The ChatZilla files to customize are in the mozillabinchromepackageschatzilla directory structure.

Conclusion

ChatZilla easily could become the bonus killer-app that is included with Mozilla now and might be included with Netscape 6. So far Netscape/AOL will not say if it will include ChatZilla with Netscape 6. However, if Netscape/AOL does not include ChatZilla in Netscape 6, it could be shooting itself in the foot.

ChatZilla is far from finished or complete. But if you want to see for yourself what it is now, download M16 and try ChatZilla. Then from time to time download the latest daily Mozilla build to see the latest additions and improvements to ChatZilla. Of course when the official release version of M16 is finished, make sure you download and install it.

Enjoy!

(see the next page for a list of related articles and other resources)

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