A Linspire-sponsored fork of Mozilla Composer, Nvu was abandoned in 2006 when its sole developer declared it 'a dead end.' Its successor KompoZer also died, and its spiritual successor BlueGriffon was discontinued in 2017.
Nvu was built on Mozilla's Gecko rendering engine and XUL framework, using the same codebase as Mozilla Composer. It supported HTML 4, CSS 2, and basic JavaScript editing. Building on XUL meant being subject to Mozilla's platform decisions, which eventually included killing XUL entirely.
In the early 2000s, there was genuine demand for a free, open-source WYSIWYG web editor that could compete with tools like Dreamweaver. Mozilla Composer existed as part of the Mozilla Suite, but it was neglected and buggy. Kevin Carmony, CEO of Linspire (the Linux distribution formerly known as Lindows), saw an opportunity and hired Daniel Glazman — a former Netscape employee with deep knowledge of the Mozilla codebase — to create Nvu.
Nvu (pronounced 'N-view') launched in 2003 as a standalone fork of Mozilla Composer. It attracted significant attention and downloads, as it was one of the few viable free web editors available. Glazman worked as essentially the sole developer, supported by Linspire's funding.
But on September 15, 2006, Glazman announced that he had stopped official development on Nvu, declaring bluntly: 'Nvu 1.0 is — for me — a dead end.' The problems were both technical (Mozilla's codebase was evolving in ways that made Nvu's approach unsustainable) and financial (Linspire's support was insufficient for a project of this scope).
The community responded with KompoZer, a fork of Nvu that aimed to fix bugs and continue development. But KompoZer was maintained by a single developer known as 'Kazé,' and by 2011, he admitted the project was 'stalled' because he was too busy to work on it. KompoZer's last release was in February 2010.
Glazman, meanwhile, started over from scratch with BlueGriffon, a new web editor based on Mozilla's Gecko engine. But BlueGriffon itself was discontinued after 14 years, with Glazman citing Mozilla killing XUL, personal burnout, and corporate issues. The last commit was in December 2019.
The Nvu-KompoZer-BlueGriffon chain represents three generations of WYSIWYG web editors, each dying the same death: a single-developer project that couldn't sustain the maintenance burden of building on top of Mozilla's rapidly changing platform.
Nvu launched as Linspire-sponsored fork of Mozilla Composer
Nvu 1.0 released
Glazman announces Nvu development has stopped
KompoZer fork of Nvu begins
KompoZer 0.8.0 — last release
BlueGriffon 3.1 — Glazman's successor to Nvu — last release
“Nvu 1.0 is — for me — a dead end.”
The death of Nvu and its descendants left the open-source world without a viable WYSIWYG web editor. The gap was never truly filled — the world moved to WordPress, Squarespace, and other web-based tools instead. Nvu's failure is partly a story of changing technology: standalone web editors became less relevant as web-based editing tools proliferated.