A community fork to fix Nvu's bugs after its creator abandoned it. KompoZer was maintained by a single developer who ran out of time by 2011. The last release was in 2010, leaving the open-source world without a WYSIWYG web editor.
KompoZer was a WYSIWYG HTML/CSS editor based on the Mozilla Gecko rendering engine, derived from Nvu. It supported HTML 4.01, XHTML 1.0, and CSS 2.1 editing with both visual and source-code modes.
When Daniel Glazman declared Nvu 'a dead end' in September 2006, the community of users who depended on a free WYSIWYG web editor was left stranded. A developer known as 'Kazé' stepped up, forking Nvu to create KompoZer with the modest goal of fixing the most egregious bugs in Nvu's codebase.
KompoZer's first official release came on August 30, 2007, and the project attracted a respectable user base — especially among educators, non-profits, and hobbyist web designers who needed a simple, free alternative to Dreamweaver. The project fixed many of Nvu's rendering bugs, improved CSS handling, and added incremental usability improvements.
But KompoZer inherited Nvu's fundamental problem: it was built on an aging Mozilla platform that was evolving underneath it. Each Firefox update could break KompoZer's rendering, and keeping up required constant maintenance work. That work fell almost entirely on one person.
In 2011, Kazé published a blog post (since deleted) admitting: 'The KompoZer project is stalled at the moment since I am the only regular developer, and I am too busy.' The last stable release, version 0.8.0b3, had been released on February 28, 2010. No further development occurred.
KompoZer's death was quiet and undramatic — no public fights, no corporate interference, no licensing disputes. Just one person who ran out of hours in the day. It's perhaps the most common and least dramatic way open-source projects die, but no less real for its mundanity.
Glazman abandons Nvu, declaring it 'a dead end'
KompoZer first official release
KompoZer 0.8.0b3 released — the last version
Kazé admits project is stalled due to lack of time
“The KompoZer project is stalled at the moment since I am the only regular developer, and I am too busy.”
KompoZer's death contributed to the broader decline of standalone WYSIWYG web editors. The market shifted to web-based platforms (WordPress, Squarespace, Wix) and code-focused editors (VS Code, Sublime Text), leaving a gap that was never filled by open-source desktop tools.