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Mozilla Firefox is a free, open source, cross-platform, graphical web browser developed by the Mozilla Corporation and hundreds of volunteers.• Beginning as a fork of the browser component (Navigator) of the Mozilla Application Suite, Firefox has since became the Mozilla Foundation's main development focus, replacing the Mozilla Suite. Firefox is officially abbreviated as Fx but the common abbreviation is FF. Before the November 9 2004 1.0 release, Firefox had already gained acclaim from numerous media outlets, including Forbes• and the Wall Street Journal.• With over 25 million downloads in the 99 days after the initial 1.0 release, Firefox became one of the most downloaded free and open source applications, especially among home users.• On October 19 2005, Firefox had its 100 millionth download, less than 1 year (just 344 days) after the release of version 1.0 (see Download count below). Firefox 1.5 was released on November 29 2005, with more than 2 million downloads within the first 36 hours.• Firefox hit 200 million downloads on July 31 2006, according to the Spread Firefox website.• Firefox 2.0 was officially released on October 24 2006, and was downloaded by over 2 million users within the first 24 hours after its release. As of September 2006, estimates suggest that Firefox's usage share is around 12% of overall browser usage (see market adoption below), with its highest usage in Germany (about 39% as of July 2006).•
History Dave Hyatt and Blake Ross began working on the Firefox project as an experimental branch of the Mozilla project. They believed that the commercial requirements of Netscape's sponsorship and developer-driven feature creep compromised the utility of the Mozilla browser. To combat what they saw as the Mozilla Suite's software bloat, they created a pared-down browser, with which they intended to replace the Mozilla Suite. On April 3 2003, The Mozilla Foundation announced that they planned to change their focus from the Mozilla Suite to Firefox and Thunderbird.• The Firefox project has gone through many name changes through its history. Originally titled Phoenix, it had to be renamed because of trademark issues with Phoenix Technologies. The replacement name, Firebird, provoked mixed reactions, particularly since the free database software Firebird uses the same name. In late April 2003, the Mozilla Foundation stated that the browser should always bear the name Mozilla Firebird in order to avoid confusion with the database software. However, continuing pressure from the FLOSS community forced another change, and on February 9 2004, Mozilla Firebird became Mozilla Firefox (or Firefox for short). The Firefox project went through many versions before 1.0 was released on November 9, 2004. Aside from stability and security fixes, the Mozilla Foundation released just one major update to Firefox—version 1.5, on November 29, 2005—before the debut of Firefox 2.0. On October 24 2006, Mozilla made a stable Firefox 2.0 available to the public. Although the scheduled release was the following day, some users noticed the stable 2.0 download on Mozilla's FTP server. The 2.0 version is a massive update to the browser with enhanced security, usability and other improved features. Future development According to the roadmap, future Firefox development will include version 3.0. Development on version 3.0, which will be based on Gecko 1.9, occurs simultaneously on the Mozilla trunk. Versions of Firefox 1.5 and on will have a staggered auto-update, which is the reason why users of Fx 1.5 were not automatically updated to Fx 2.0. When support for Fx 1.5 ends, users will be automatically updated to the newest version. This staggered release schedule eases the load on servers and mirrors as well as allowing development to slowly saturate users. This in turn also allows for an easier way to find and fix bugs. Goals for Firefox include changes to the tabbed browsing environment, enhancements to the extensions manager, enhancements to the GUI,• improvements to the find, search and software update engines; a greater level of accessibility, session and download restore, and new improved Anti-phishing features.• Newer versions of Firefox will use Cairo as the rendering layer instead of GDI+.• Mozilla Firefox 1.5 and future releases of Camino will also include the Java Embedding plugin,• which allow Mac OS X users to run Java applets with the latest 1.4 and 5.0 versions of Java (the default Java software shipped by Apple is not compatible with any browser, except its own Safari). Version 3.0
Version 4.0 On October 13 2006, Brendan Eich, Mozilla's Chief Technology Officer, wrote about the plans for Mozilla 2.0, the platform on which Firefox 4 is likely to be based. These changes include improving and removing XPCOM APIs, switching to standard C++ features, just-in-time compilation with JavaScript 2, and tool-time and runtime security checks.• Features The developers of Firefox aim to produce a browser that "just works" for most casual users. User-created extensions and plugins can be installed to integrate with Firefox giving a wide range of choice for the end-user. The main features included with Firefox are tabbed browsing, incremental find, live bookmarking, a customizable download manager and a built-in Search toolbar. The user can customize their version of Firefox with downloadable extensions, a variety of different themes and skins, and many hidden preferences that are easily accessible to the advanced user. Mozilla Firefox claims support for many software standards, including but not restricted to: HTML, XML, XHTML, CSS, ECMAScript (JavaScript), DOM, MathML, DTD, XSL, SVG, XPath and PNG images with variable transparency. Firefox release builds do not yet pass the Acid2 standards-compliance test. However, there are developmental versions of Firefox that currently pass the Acid2 test, and Firefox 3 is expected to pass Acid2. Mozilla Firefox is a multi-platform browser, providing support for various versions of Microsoft Windows, including 98, 98SE, Me, NT 4.0, 2000, XP, and Server 2003. It also runs on Mac OS X, and the Linux-based operating systems using the X Window System. Although not officially released for certain operating systems, the freely available source code works for many other operating systems, including but not restricted to: FreeBSD , OS/2, Solaris, SkyOS, BeOS and more recently, Windows XP Professional x64 Edition . Firefox also provides an environment in which web developers can use built in tools (from extensions). These include a Javascript Console, a DOM Inspector, Venkman JavaScript debugger, and an integrated development toolkit called Web Developer . The fact that Firefox has fewer and less severe publicly known unpatched security vulnerabilities than Internet Explorer (see Comparison of web browsers) is often cited as a reason to switch from Internet Explorer to Firefox for improved security.• A 2006 Symantec study showed that Firefox had surpassed Internet Explorer in the number of vendor-confirmed vulnerabilities that year through to September, though these were patched more quickly than vulnerabilities found in other browsers. Symantec later clarified their statement, saying that Firefox still had fewer security vulnerabilities, as counted by security researchers. Firefox uses SSL/TLS to protect communications with web servers using strong cryptography. It also supports smartcards for secure login to web servers. It uses a sandbox security model and the developers use a "bug bounty" scheme, for finding fixes for some security and feature additions. Performance Internet Week ran an article in which many readers reported high memory usage in Firefox 1.5. Mozilla developers claim the higher memory use of Firefox 1.5 is sometimes at least partially an effect of the new fast backwards and forwards (FastBack) feature. Other known causes of memory problems are misbehaving extensions, such as Google Toolbar and Adblock or plug-ins, such as older versions of Adobe Acrobat Reader. However, when PC Magazine compared memory usage of Firefox, Opera, and Internet Explorer, they found that Firefox seemed to use only about as much memory as the other browsers. Tests performed by PC World and Zimbra indicate that Firefox 2 uses less memory than Internet Explorer 7. Softpedia notes that Firefox takes longer to start up than other browsers• and browser speed tests confirm this to be the case. Some note that Firefox takes longer to launch than other browsers such as Internet Explorer or Opera on Windows. Other Gecko-based browsers such as K-Meleon, which use platform-native user interface implementations, generally run faster than Firefox. IE also launches slightly faster than Firefox on Microsoft Windows since many of its components are built into Windows and are loaded during system startup. On Microsoft Windows, this can be addressed by using the open-source FFPreloader Utility. Licensing Firefox is an open-source application, trilicensed under the Mozilla Public License (MPL), GNU General Public License (GPL), and the GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL). The licenses permit anyone to view the source code, as well as modifying and redistributing it (though with trademark restrictions). Netscape and Flock are examples of software based on Firefox code. The Free Software Foundation (FSF) considers the official Firefox binaries released by Mozilla to not be free software because they include the proprietary crash reporter Talkback, have trademark restrictions, and force the user to accept a clickwrap agreement (the latter only applies to the Windows version). Google and Mozilla developers are working on Airbag, an open-source replacement for Talkback, that will allow official Firefox builds to be entirely free of proprietary software. In the past, Firefox was licensed solely under the Mozilla Public License (MPL). The FSF criticizes the MPL for being weak copyleft; the license permits, in limited ways, proprietary, derivative works. Code under the MPL also cannot be legally linked with code under the GNU General Public License (GPL) or the GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL). To address these concerns, Mozilla tri-licensed Firefox under the MPL, GPL, and LGPL, which permits developers to use whichever license they wish in creating derivative works. The effect of the tri-licensing is that developers can legally link Firefox code with GPL or LGPL code, but still allows them to create proprietary, derivative works (though not both at once). In September 2006, Mozilla requested Debian not to use the official Firefox name for its own patched version. Mozilla requires that distribution of builds called "Firefox" include the official artwork and that any changes made to the Firefox code required approval by Mozilla. Since the official artwork is trademarked and copyrighted, thus going against the Debian Free Software Guidelines, and since Debian didn't want to go through Mozilla to make changes, Debian decided to fork Firefox into IceWeasel. Market adoption Usage share Statistics reference: Usage share of web browsers Web-surfers have adopted Firefox rapidly, despite the dominance of Internet Explorer in the browser market. Internet Explorer has seen a steady decline of its usage share since Firefox's release. According to several sources (as listed in statistics reference), by July 2006, Firefox had around 12% of global usage share. Europe, according to a study released by the firm XiTi on 2006-06-16, generally had higher percentages of Firefox use, with an average of 20%. Download count Cumulative downloads have increased in a near-linear fashion since the time Firefox 1.0 was released in November 2004 until July 2006. In other words, the download rate has remained fairly stable. None of the Mozilla Foundation's previous product releases experienced that kind of growth. These download counts do not include downloads using software updates and downloads from third-party websites. The download counter is available as an RSS feed, so this data is accessible in near-realtime. It should be noted that a download count is not a user count, as a single download can be installed over many machines, or one person can download the software multiple times. Mozilla Vice President of Products Christopher Beard estimates that Firefox currently has 70 million to 80 million users as of October 2006. Spread Firefox campaigns The rapid adoption of Firefox apparently accelerated in part because of a series of aggressive marketing campaigns since 2004. For example, Blake Ross and Asa Dotzler organized a series of events dubbed "marketing week". On September 14 2004, a marketing portal dubbed "Spread Firefox" (SFX) debuted along with the Firefox Preview Release, creating a centralized space for the discussion of various marketing techniques. The portal enhanced the "Get Firefox" button program, giving users "referrer points" as an incentive. The site lists the top 250 referrers. From time to time, the SFX team or SFX members launch marketing events organized at the Spread Firefox website. World Firefox Day 2006 The World Firefox Day campaign started on July 15 2006, which is the anniversary of the founding of the Mozilla Foundation, and ran until September 15 2006. Participants registered themselves and a friend on the website for nomination to have their names displayed on the Firefox Friends Wall, a digital wall that will be displayed at the headquarters of the Mozilla Foundation. An e-mail is sent to the nominated friend which provides a hyperlink to download Mozilla Firefox. If the friend downloads the program from this link the nomination is accepted. The names also appear on a website. The link to this website can be found by looking in the credits of the current version of Mozilla Firefox, Firefox 2.0. Industry adoption Since the pre-1.0 stages, several well-known websites and web applications, including Gmail, have supported (and in some cases, required) the use of Firefox. Since March 30 2005, the Google search engine has utilized the link prefetching feature of Firefox for faster searching. Link prefetching involves a standards-compliant optimization technique that utilizes the browser's idle time to download or prefetch documents that the user might visit in the near future. For example, if you search for "internet explorer", Firefox may connect with Microsoft's server (first link returned by Google), even if you eventually choose link to Wikipedia. Google, Inc. also recommends Firefox as the browser for its Blogger.com weblog service. On May 18 2005, eBay announced support for Firefox for its eBay Picture Manager. Search engine companies including Google, Yahoo! and A9.com now also offer Firefox extensions for accessing their services, in addition to their original Internet Explorer add-ons. Google has released four Extensions for Firefox, further affirming the company's interest in Firefox. In December 2005, the Inquirer ran an article claiming that Dell UK would start shipping the Firefox browser pre-installed on their PCs, but neither Dell nor Mozilla have confirmed this. Institutional adoption During the FOSDEM 2005 conference, Tristan Nitot, president of Mozilla Europe, noted that Firefox has had more success in the consumer market than with institutions. He also theorized that pressure from Microsoft caused institutions who had adopted Firefox to remain silent about it. Some observers, such as Serdar Yegulalp of TechTarget• and Jim Rapooza of eWEEK• note that Firefox does not provide tools that make institutional deployment easier, such as a client customization kit (which Mozilla has since released•) or Microsoft Installer (MSI) packages. Furthermore, they note that Firefox does not support some technologies that are sometimes used in institutional environments, such as ActiveX and Active Directory. While institutions may not be actively deploying Firefox in large numbers, more and more are allowing their employees to install Firefox, according to JupiterResearch. They found that in 2006, 44% of companies with more than 200 employees allowed Firefox on their employees' systems, compared with 26% in 2005.• Other versions, builds, and forks Portable versions Mozilla Firefox - Portable Editionhttp://portableapps.com/apps/internet/firefox_portable (also known as Firefox Portable) is a repackaged version of Firefox designed to run from a USB flash drive, iPod, external hard drive, or other portable media. The newest version can be run live from a CD. It arose out of a mozillaZine thread in June of 2004. John T. Haller released the first packaged version and has led its further development. It includes a specialized launcher that adjusts extensions and themes to work as it is moved between different computers. There is also a portable version of Firefox available for Macintosh computers called Portable Firefox OS X.http://www.freesmug.org/portableapps/firefox Here is a full list of Firefox in portable app form: Response from competition Despite Firefox's apparent gains on Internet Explorer, Microsoft's head of Australian operations, Steve Vamos, stated that he did not see Firefox as a threat and that there was not significant demand for the featureset of Firefox among Microsoft's users. Vamos stated that he himself had never used it. Former Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates has used Firefox, but he has commented "so much software gets downloaded all the time, but do people actually use it?" However a Microsoft SEC filing on June 30 2005 acknowledged that browsers such as Mozilla are competitive threats to Internet Explorer: "Competitors such as Mozilla offer software that competes with the Internet Explorer Web browsing capabilities of our Windows operating system products." In August 2006, Microsoft made an offer to Mozilla to help integrate Firefox with the forthcoming Windows Vista, which Mozilla accepted. Upon the release of Firefox 2.0, the Internet Explorer 7 development team shipped a cake to Mozilla as a sign of appreciation. * Gallery Image:FFX1.5.PNG|Firefox 1.5 in Microsoft Windows XP Image:FFX2winmedia.PNG|Firefox 2 in Microsoft Windows XP Media Center Image:Firefox2.png|Firefox 2 running under GNOME on Ubuntu Footnotes Further reading See also Mozilla | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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