Mozilla Firefox Totally Explained

Everything about Phoenix Browser totally explained

Mozilla Firefox (abbreviated officially as Fx, but also commonly as FF), is a web browser descended from the Mozilla Application Suite, managed by the Mozilla Corporation. Firefox had 17.76% of the recorded usage share of web browsers as of April 2008, making it the second-most popular browser in current use worldwide, after Internet Explorer.
   Firefox uses the open source Gecko layout engine, which implements some current web standards plus a few features which are intended to anticipate likely additions to the standards.
   Firefox includes tabbed browsing, a spell checker, incremental find, live bookmarking, a download manager, and an integrated search system that uses the user's desired search engine. Functions can be added through around 2,000 add-ons created by third-party developers; the most popular include NoScript (script blocker), FoxyTunes (controls music players), Adblock Plus (ad blocker), StumbleUpon (website discovery), DownThemAll! (download functions) and Web Developer (web tools).
   Firefox runs on various versions of Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, and many other Unix-like operating systems. Its current stable release is version 2.0.0.14, released on April 16, 2008. Firefox's source code is free software, released under a tri-license GPL/LGPL/MPL.

History

Dave Hyatt and Blake Ross began working on the Firefox project as an experimental branch of the Mozilla project. They believed 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 stand-alone browser, with which they intended to replace the Mozilla Suite. On April 3 2003, the Mozilla Organization announced that they planned to change their focus from the Mozilla Suite to Firefox and Thunderbird.
The Firefox project has undergone several name changes. Originally titled Phoenix, it was renamed because of trademark issues with Phoenix Technologies. The replacement name, Firebird, provoked an intense response from the Firebird free database software project. In response, the Mozilla Foundation stated that the browser should always bear the name Mozilla Firebird to avoid confusion with the database software. Continuing pressure from the database server's development community forced another change; on February 9 2004, Mozilla Firebird became Mozilla Firefox, often referred to as simply Firefox. Mozilla prefers Firefox to be abbreviated as Fx or fx, though it's often abbreviated as FF.
The Firefox project went through many versions before 1.0 was released on November 9 2004. After a series of stability and security fixes, the Mozilla Foundation released its first major update, Firefox version 1.5, on November 29, 2005. On October 24 2006, Mozilla released Firefox 2. This version includes updates to the tabbed browsing environment, the extensions manager, the GUI, and the find, search and software update engines; a new session restore feature; inline spell checking; and an anti-phishing feature which was implemented by Google as an extension, and later merged into the program itself. In December 2007, Firefox Live Chat

was launched. It allows users to ask volunteers questions through a system powered by Jive Software, with guaranteed hours of operation and the possibility of help after hours.

Release history

Colour	Meaning
Red	Old release; not supported
Yellow	Old release; supported
Green	Current release; supported
Purple	Test release; supported
Blue	Future release; supported

Browser name	Gecko version	Version	Codename	Release date	Significant changes
Phoenix	1.2	0.1	Pescadero	September 23 2002	First release; customizable toolbar, quicksearch.
		0.2	Santa Cruz	October 1 2002	Sidebar, extension management.
		0.3	Lucia	October 14 2002	Image blocking, pop-up blocking whitelist, tabbed browsing.
	1.3	0.4	Oceano	October 19 2002	Themes, pop-up blocking improvements, toolbar customization.
	1.3	0.5	Naples	December 7 2002	Multiple homepages, sidebar and accessibility improvements, history
Mozilla Firebird	1.5	0.6	Glendale	May 17 2003	New default theme (Qute), bookmark and privacy improvements, smooth scrolling, automatic image resizing.
Mozilla Firebird	1.5	0.7	Indio	October 15 2003	Automatic scrolling, password manager, preferences panel improvements.
Mozilla Firefox	1.6	0.8	Royal Oak	February 9 2004	Windows installer, offline working, bookmarks and download manager improvements, rebranded with new logo.
	1.7	0.9	One Tree Hill	June 15 2004	New default theme (Winstripe), comprehensive data migration, new extension/theme manager, reduced download size, new help system, Linux installer, mail icon (Windows only).
	1.7	1.0	Phoenix	November 9 2004	Official version 1.0 release. Added new features such as RSS/Atom feed support, find toolbar, plugin finder. Reached its end of life on April 13, 2006 with the release of version 1.0.8. (support for older versions of Firefox typically ends six months after a new major version is available).
	1.8	1.5	Deer Park	November 29 2005	Official version 1.5 release. Added support for SVG and canvas, UI adjustments and improvements in JavaScript 1.5 and CSS 2/3. Reached its end of life on May 30, 2007 with the release of Firefox 1.5.0.12.
Mozilla Firefox 2	1.8.1	2.0	Bon Echo	October 24 2006	Official version 2.0 release. Added new features such as session restoration after a browser crash, search suggestion for Google and Yahoo!, new search plugin manager and add-on manager, web feed previewing, bookmark microsummaries and anti-phishing protection. Winstripe theme refresh. Included support for JavaScript 1.7.
Mozilla Firefox 2	1.8.1	2.0.0.14		April 17 2008	Current stable version. Stability and security fixes.
Mozilla Firefox 3	1.9	3.0rc1		May 16 2008	Cairo used as a graphics backend. Cocoa Widgets included in OS X builds. API's implemented from WHATWG specs. Changes to how DOM events are dispatched, how HTML object elements are loaded, and how web pages are rendered. New SVG elements and filters, and improved SVG specification compliance. Acid2 test compliant. New UI improvements, including default themes for different operating systems and new download manager. Windows 95, 98, ME, Mac OS X v10.3.9 and lower, and GTK+ 2.8 and lower are no longer supported. Addons.mozilla.org integration in the Add-ons window.
Mozilla Firefox 3	1.9	3.0	Gran Paradiso
Mozilla Firefox 4	2.0	4.0

Features

Features included with Firefox are tabbed browsing, spell checker, incremental find, live bookmarking, an integrated download manager, and an integrated search system that uses the user's desired search engine. The developers of Firefox aimed to produce a browser that "just surfs the web" and delivers the "best possible browsing experience to the widest possible set of people."
Users can customize Firefox with extensions and themes. Mozilla maintains an add-on repository at addons.mozilla.org

with nearly 2000 add-ons in it as of September 2007.
Firefox provides an environment for web developers in which they can use built-in tools, such as the Error Console or the DOM Inspector, or extensions, such as Firebug.

Standards support

Mozilla Firefox supports many web standards, including HTML, XML, XHTML, SVG 1.1 (partial), CSS (with extensions), ECMAScript (JavaScript), DOM, MathML, DTD, XSLT, XPath, and PNG images with alpha transparency. Firefox also supports standards proposals created by the WHATWG such as client-side storage, and canvas element.
Although Firefox 2 doesn't pass the Acid2 standards-compliance test, all releases since Firefox 3.0 Beta 2 do.

Security

Firefox uses a sandbox security model, and limits scripts from accessing data from other web sites based on the same origin policy. It uses SSL/TLS to protect communications with web servers using strong cryptography when using the https protocol. It also provides support for web applications to use smartcards for authentication purposes.
   The Mozilla Foundation offers a "bug bounty" to researchers who discover severe security holes in Firefox. Official guidelines for handling security vulnerabilities discourage early disclosure of vulnerabilities so as not to give potential attackers an advantage in creating exploits.
   Because Firefox has fewer and less severe publicly known unpatched security vulnerabilities than Internet Explorer (see Comparison of web browsers), improved security is often cited as a reason to switch from Internet Explorer to Firefox. The Washington Post reports that exploit code for critical unpatched security vulnerabilities in Internet Explorer was available for 284 days in 2006. In comparison, exploit code for critical security vulnerabilities in Firefox was available for 9 days before Mozilla shipped a patch to remedy the problem.
   A 2006 Symantec study showed that although Firefox had surpassed other browsers in the number of vendor-confirmed vulnerabilities that year through September, these vulnerabilities were patched far more quickly than those found in other browsers. Symantec later clarified their statement, saying that Firefox still had fewer security vulnerabilities than Internet Explorer, as counted by security researchers. As of March 26, 2008, Firefox 2 has four security vulnerabilities unpatched, the most severe of which was rated "less critical" by Secunia. Internet Explorer 7 has eight security vulnerabilities unpatched, the most severe of which was rated "Moderately critical" by Secunia.

Licensing

Firefox is free and open source software, and is tri-licensed under the Mozilla Public License (MPL), GNU General Public License (GPL), and the GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL). Several elements don't fall under the scope of the tri-license and have their use restricted by the EULA, including the trademarked Firefox name and artwork, and the proprietary closed-source Talkback crash reporter. Because of this and the clickwrap agreement included in the Windows version, the Free Software Foundation (FSF) consider these builds proprietary software. However, BreakPad, an open source crash reporting system, is expected to replace Talkback and is planned for Firefox 3.0. According to plans, Firefox 3.0 will be the first version of Firefox that's fully open source.
   In the past, Firefox was licensed solely under the MPL, which the FSF criticizes for being weak copyleft; the license permits, in limited ways, proprietary derivative works. Additionally, code under the MPL can't legally be linked with code under the GPL or the LGPL. To address these concerns, Mozilla re-licensed Firefox under the tri-license scheme of MPL, GPL, and LGPL. Since the re-licensing, developers have been free to choose the license under which that'll receive the code, to suit their intended use: GPL or LGPL linking and derivative works when one of those licenses is chosen, or MPL use (including the possibility of proprietary derivative works) if they choose the MPL.
   There has been some controversy over the Mozilla Foundation's intentions in stopping certain open source distributions from using the "Firefox" trademark. Former Mozilla CEO Mitchell Baker explained in an interview in 2007 that distributions could freely use the Firefox trademark if they didn't modify source-code, and that the Mozilla Foundation's only concern was with users getting a consistent experience when they used "Firefox".
   To allow distributions of the code without using the official branding, the Firefox source code contains a "branding switch". This switch allows the code to be compiled without the official logo and name, for example to produce a derivative work unencumbered by restrictions on the Firefox trademark (this is also often used for betas and alphas of future Firefox versions). In the unbranded compilation the trademarked logo and name are replaced with a freely distributable generic globe logo and the name of the release series from which the modified version was derived. The name "Deer Park" is used for derivatives of Firefox 1.5, "Bon Echo" for derivatives of Firefox 2.0, and "Gran Paradiso" is used for derivatives of Firefox 3.0. The codename Minefield and a modified version of the generic logo stylised to look like a bomb is used for nightly trunk builds.
   Outside of certain exceptions made for "community editions", distributing modified versions of Firefox under the "Firefox" name requires explicit approval from Mozilla for the changes made to the underlying code, and requires the use of all of the official branding. For example, it isn't permissible to use the name "Firefox" without also using the official logo. When the Debian project decided to stop using the official Firefox logo in 2006 (because of copyright and trademark restrictions on its use incompatible with the project's guidelines), they were told by a representative of the Mozilla Foundation that this wasn't acceptable, and were asked to either comply with the published trademark guidelines or cease using the "Firefox" name in their distribution. Ultimately, Debian switched to branding their modified version of Firefox "Iceweasel".

Advertising

The rapid adoption of Firefox, 100 million downloads in its first year of availability, followed a series of aggressive marketing campaigns starting in 2004 with a series of events Blake Ross and Asa Dotzler called "marketing weeks".
   On September 12 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.
   The "World Firefox Day" campaign started on July 15 2006, the third 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.
   On February 21 2008 in honor of reaching 500 million downloads, the Firefox community celebrated by visiting FreeRice to earn 500 million grains of rice.
   Some of Firefox's contributors made a crop circle of the Firefox logo, which can be seen on Google Earth.

Market adoption

Firefox market share by version — NetApplications.com, April 2008
Firefox 0.1	0.01%
Firefox 1.0	0.24%
Firefox 1.5	0.42%
Firefox 2.0	16.69%
Firefox 3.0 (beta)	0.39%
All versions	17.76%

Mozilla Firefox's market share has grown for each growth period since inception, mostly at the expense of Internet Explorer. Internet Explorer has seen a steady decline of its usage share since Firefox's release. By early 2008, Firefox had approximately 15% global usage share of web browsers. Market shares break down as following: 43% for Internet Explorer 7, 32% for Internet Explorer 6, 16% for Firefox 2.0, 4% for Safari 3.0, and less than half a percent for both Firefox 1.x and Internet Explorer 5.x versions.
As one article noted after the release of Firefox 2.0 in October 2006, "IE6 had the lion's share of the browser market with 77.22%. Internet Explorer 7 had climbed to 3.18%, while Firefox 2.0 was at 0.69%." Downloads have continued at an increasing rate since Firefox 1.0 was released in November 2004, and as of February 21, 2008 Firefox has been downloaded over 500 million times. This number doesn't include downloads using software updates or those from third-party websites. They don't represent a user count, as one download may be installed on many machines, one person may download the software multiple times, or the software may be obtained from a third party. According to Mozilla CEO John Lilly, Firefox had about 140 million users as of February 2008.

Critical reaction

Forbes.com called Firefox the best browser in a 2004 commentary piece. PC World named Firefox "Product of the Year" in 2005 on their "100 Best Products of 2005" list. After the release of Firefox 2 and Internet Explorer 7 in 2006, PC World reviewed both and declared that Firefox was the better browser. Which? Magazine named Firefox its "Best Buy" web browser.
In December 2005 Internet Week ran an article in which many readers reported high memory usage in Firefox 1.5. Mozilla developers said that the higher memory use of Firefox 1.5 was at least partially due to the new fast backwards-and-forwards (FastBack) feature. Other known causes of memory problems were malfunctioning extensions such as Google Toolbar and some older versions of Adblock, or plug-ins, such as older versions of Adobe Acrobat Reader. When PC Magazine compared memory usage of Firefox, Opera and Internet Explorer, they found that Firefox used approximately as much memory as the other two browsers. Tests performed by PC World and Zimbra indicate that Firefox 2 uses less memory than Internet Explorer 7. Firefox 3, in testing of beta 1 version, didn't use less memory than version 2, although it still used less memory than Internet Explorer 7.
Like other browsers, Firefox has had a number of vulnerabilities that have affected its security, although according to CERT

, not as many as Internet Explorer. Softpedia notes that Firefox takes longer to start up than other browsers, which was confirmed by browser speed tests. IE 6 launches slightly faster than Firefox on Microsoft Windows since many of its components are built into Windows and are loaded during system startup. As a workaround for the issue, a preloader application was created that loads components of Firefox on startup, similar to Internet Explorer. A Windows Vista feature called SuperFetch performs a similar task of preloading Firefox if it's used often enough.

Relationship with Google

The Mozilla Corporation's relationship with Google has been noted in the media, especially with regards to their paid referral agreement. The release of the anti-phishing protection in Firefox 2 in particular raised considerable controversy: anti-phishing protection enabled by default is based on a list updated by twice-hourly downloads to the user's computer from Google's server. The user can't change the data provider within the GUI, and isn't informed who the default data provider is. The browser also sends Google's cookie with each update request. An additional, explicitly opt-in security feature has been added to recent builds by the Mozilla Foundation. This anti-phishing feature provides live protection by checking each visited URL with Google. Some Internet privacy advocacy groups have expressed concerns surrounding Google's possible uses of this data, though Firefox's privacy policy states that Google may not use personal information for any purposes other than the anti-phishing protection feature. In 2006, the Mozilla Foundation and Mozilla Corporation had a combined revenue of US$66.9 million, with approximately 90 percent derived from search engine royalties.

Response from Microsoft

Microsoft's head of Australian operations, Steve Vamos, stated in late 2004 that he didn't see Firefox as a threat and that there wasn't significant demand for the feature set of Firefox among Microsoft's users. Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates has used Firefox, but he's commented "so much software gets downloaded all the time, but do people actually use it?"
   A Microsoft SEC filing on June 30 2005 acknowledged that "competitors such as Mozilla offer software that competes with the Internet Explorer Web browsing capabilities of our Windows operating system products." The release of Internet Explorer 7 was fast tracked, and included functionality that was previously available in Firefox and other browsers, such as tabbed browsing and RSS feeds.
   Despite the cold reception from Microsoft's top management, the Internet Explorer development team does have a healthy relationship with Mozilla. They meet regularly to discuss web standards such as extended validation certificates. In 2005 Mozilla agreed to allow Microsoft to use its Web feed logo in the interest of common graphical representation of the Web feeds feature.
   In August 2006, Microsoft offered to help Mozilla integrate Firefox with the then-forthcoming Windows Vista, which Mozilla accepted.
   In October 2006, as congratulations for a successful ship of Firefox 2, the Internet Explorer 7 development team sent a cake to Mozilla. As a nod to the browser wars, some readers joked about the cake being poisoned, while others jokingly suggested that Mozilla send a cake back along with the recipe, in reference to the open-source software movement.
   In November 2007, Microsoft employee Jeff Jones criticized Firefox, claiming that Internet Explorer experienced fewer vulnerabilities and fewer higher severity vulnerabilities than Firefox in typical enterprise scenarios. Mozilla developer Mike Shaver discounted the study, citing Microsoft's bundling of security fixes and the study's focus on fixes, rather than vulnerabilities, as crucial flaws.

Future developments

Development of Firefox after version 2.0 is split over two milestones: version 3.0 and version 4.0. Firefox 3.0 is now in the development stage and is expected to be released in mid 2008. Development for the 3.0 releases takes place on the Mozilla trunk, with releases and pre-release nightly builds coming from the Mozilla 1.8.1 branch (2.0) and the Mozilla 1.9 branch

(3.0). Development for 4.0 will be based on Mozilla 2.

Version 3.0

The development name for Mozilla Firefox 3 is Gran Paradiso. The precursory releases are codenamed "Minefield", as this is the name of the trunk builds. "Gran Paradiso", like other Firefox development names, is an actual place; in this case the highest mountain group in the Graian Alps.
   In 2006, the development team asked users to submit feature requests that they wish to be included in Firefox 3.
   The Mozilla Foundation released the first beta on 19 November 2007, the second beta on 18 December 2007 The first release candidate was released on 16 May 2008. Mozilla engineers expect to ship the final release by the end of June 2008.
   NetApplications notes that the use of Firefox 3 beta has been increasing rapidly up to a usage share of 0.39% in April 2008. They interpret this increase to mean that Firefox 3 betas are stable and that users are using it as their primary browser.

Backend changes

One of the big changes in Firefox 3 is the implementation of Gecko 1.9, an updated layout engine. The new version fixes many bugs, improves standard compliance, and implements new web APIs. In particular, it'll make Firefox 3 the first official release of a Mozilla browser to pass the Acid2 test, a standards-compliance test for web-page rendering. It also gets a better score on the Acid3 test than Firefox 2.
There are regular XULRunner-based builds being generated daily, but Firefox 3 is very unlikely to use this delivery mechanism.
Some of the new features are defined in the WHATWG HTML 5 specification is used rather than the default libc one.
Gecko 1.9 uses Cairo as a graphics backend, allowing for improved graphics performance and better consistency of look and feel on various operating systems. Because of cairo's lack of support for Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows Me and Windows NT (versions 4.0 and below), and because Microsoft ended support for Windows 98 and Windows Me on July 11 2006, Firefox 3 won't run on those operating systems. Similarly, the Mac version of Firefox 3 will only run on Mac OS X 10.4 or higher, but, unlike previous versions, will have a native Cocoa widget interface.

Frontend changes

Work is currently in progress to make new default themes for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux, giving Firefox a more native look and feel on different operating systems. As of Firefox 3 Beta 4, themes have been created for Mac OS X, Linux, Microsoft Windows XP, and Microsoft Windows Vista. When running on the K Desktop Environment or GNOME, Firefox 3 gets the icons from the environment; thus, when the desktop environment icon theme changes, Firefox follows suit. Additionally, the GTK version has replaced the non-native tab bar that was implemented in Firefox 2.0 and instead uses the native GTK+ tab style.
   As for the frontend changes, Firefox will feature a redesigned download manager with built-in search and the ability to resume downloads. Also, a new plug-in manager is included in the add-ons window and extensions can be installed with a package manager. Microformats are supported for use by software that can understand their use in documents to store data in a machine-readable form.
   The password manager in Firefox 3 will now ask the user if they'd like it to remember the password after the log on attempt rather than before. By doing this users are able to avoid storing an incorrect password in the password manager after a bad log on attempt.
   Firefox 3 will use the new Places system for storing bookmarks and history in an SQLite backend. The new system stores more information about user's history and bookmarks, in particular letting the user tag the pages. It is also used to implement an improved algorithm for the new location bar auto-complete feature.
   The Mac version of Firefox 3 will support Growl notifications, the OS X spell check, and Aqua-style form controls.
   The default icons and icon layout for Firefox 3 will also change dramatically, and Firefox 3 will take on a keyhole shape for the forward and back buttons by default on two of the three platforms. However, the keyhole shape doesn't take effect in Linux or in the small-icon mode. The Iconfactory is creating the icons for the Microsoft Windows platform. In addition, separate icons sets were planned for Windows XP and Vista.

Themes

Microsoft Windows Vista "Strata" theme on Ubuntu.

Version 4.0

On October 13 2006, Brendan Eich, Mozilla's Chief Technology Officer, wrote about the plans for Mozilla 2, the platform on which Firefox 4.0 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 (known as the Tamarin project), tool-time and runtime security checks. It has also been announced that support for the Gopher protocol will be removed by default.

Future features

Open-source, in-browser video playback is intended to be included in Firefox, according to Mitchell Baker, Mozilla's former Chief Executive Officer. The goal is to do video playback without being encumbered by patent issues that are associated with so many video technologies.
Baker also discussed the Mozilla Foundation's project to create a version of Firefox that will run reliably on mobile phones, as well as a strategy for syncing content downloaded on a PC with mobile handsets.

Webware 100 winner, June 2007

PC World 100 Best Products of 2007, May 2007

PC Magazine Editors' Choice, October 2006

CNET Editors' Choice, October 2006

PC World's 100 Best Products of 2006, July 2006

PC Magazine Technical Excellence Award, Software and Development Tools category, January 2006

PC Magazine Best of the Year Award, December 27, 2005

PC Pro Real World Award (Mozilla Foundation), December 8, 2005

CNET Editors' Choice, November 2005

UK Usability Professionals' Association Award Best Software Application 2005, November 2005

Macworld Editor's Choice with a 4.5 Mice Rating, November 2005

Softpedia User’s Choice Award, September 2005

TUX 2005 Readers' Choice Award, September 2005

PC World Product of the Year, June 2005

Forbes Best of the Web, May 2005

PC Magazine Editor’s Choice Award, May 2005Further Information

Get more info on 'Phoenix Browser'.

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