Jmol was originally intended to be a fully functional replacement for XMol which was a molecular viewing program developed at the Minnesota Supercomputer Center. Although the program executables were distributed, the source code was not available to users, and since the program has not been maintained, the free binary versions have become obsolete. For example, the SGI version of XMol does not run on IRIX 6.x because IRIX has switched to a new executable format.

Jmol is a Java molecular viewer for three-dimensional chemical structures. Features include reading a variety of file types and output from quantum chemistry programs, and animation of multi-frame files and computed normal modes from quantum programs.

Jmol is a free, open source molecule viewer written in Java. It runs as a standalone application and as a web browser applet.

Jmol is a collaboratively developed visualization and measurement tool for scientists and educators.