History of Computers - Mozilla Firefox

Page created by Tom Viehman

Firefox

Firefox is a modern, highly popular freeware web browser produced and marketed by the Mozilla Corporation under the GNU license. Firefox is free and open source software.

Overview

Firefox was conceived by Mozilla project members Dave Hyatt and Blake Ross to combat the bloating of the Mozilla Suite and the popularity of Netscape. Firefox 1.0 was released on November 9, 2004, having undergone several name changes in the process. Firefox 2.0 was released on October 24, 2006; it introduced tabbed browsing, increased security, a session restore feature, anti-phishing, and several bug fixes. Version 3.0, released on June 17, 2008, introduced a new download manager, history and bookmarks, and browser themes. 3.0 and subsequent releases run on the Mozilla Gecko layout engine. Version 3.5 was released on July 16, 2009. This newest version supports multi-touch, video and audio HTML 5 tags, and XMLHttpRequests. As of August 25, 2011, Firefox 6.0 is the latest, stable system available for mass public download. Firefox is open source and freeware, meaning that anyone can download and/or edit the software. Firefox is compatible with all Windows operating systems through Vista, UNIX based systems, and MacOS based systems. The multitude of plugins (over 5000) available for Firefox give it incredible versatility and can be used to elevate its capabilities far beyond those of equivalent web browsers.

Significance

Firefox is one of the most widely known freeware programs in existence. Even Internet Explorer, the most widely-used browser, has borrowed many features from Firefox. Firefox's popularity has increased public knowledge of freeware and helped disseminate the concept that freeware is often equal or better than their commercial counterparts. Internet Explorer is the only web browser with more market share than Firefox, but Firefox controls 25.89% of the user market share on web browsers. That number increases to 47% among those with "an interest in web technologies." The constantly evolving nature and free-to-edit nature of Firefox gives it great potential for evolution, similar to other free software programs. As time passes, free software is becoming more and more prominent in the public conscious, and Firefox is helping to inform people of the potential of free software.

Links

http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Firefox

http://www.dmoz.org/Computers/Software/Internet/Clients/WWW/Browsers/Firefox/