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With Firefox, the Mozilla Foundation aims to develop a small, fast, simple, and highly extensible web browser (separate from the larger Mozilla Suite). Firefox has become the main focus of Mozilla development along with the Mozilla Thunderbird email client and has replaced the Mozilla Suite as the official browser release of the Mozilla Foundation.
Firefox has attracted attention as an alternative to Microsoft Internet Explorer, since Internet Explorer has come under fire by the media for insecurity, lack of features, disregard for Web standards, and vulnerability to spyware and malware installation. [4] Firefox lacks the often dangerous ActiveX component. It also features an integrated pop-up blocker, tabbed browsing, and an extension mechanism for adding to the browser. Additionally, it is not integrated with Microsoft WindowsImage use policy. Microsoft Windows is a range of commercial operating environments for personal computers. The range was first introduced by Microsoft in 1985 and eventually has come to dominate the world personal computer market. All recent versions of, an oft-heard criticism of Internet Explorer. Although these features have already been available for some time in other browsers such as the Mozilla Suite and OperaOpera is a cross-platform internet software suite consisting of a web browser, e-mail/ news client, address book, newsfeed reader, IRC chat client, and download manager. It is actively developed by Opera Software of Oslo, Norway. Although Opera is closed, Firefox is the first of these browsers to have achieved large-scale adoption. Microsoft has stated that they do not feel the aforementioned issues are a common concern. [5] Firefox has been targeted to grab around 10% of the Internet Explorer market share by 2005, which many have heralded as the return of the browser warsThe Browser Wars is the name given to the competition between web browsers for dominance in the marketplace. Specifically, it is most commonly used to refer to the struggle between Microsoft Internet Explorer and Netscape Navigator for the dominance of th. [6]
The Firefox project started as an experimental branch of the Mozilla browser project led by Dave HyattDave Hyatt is a software developer currently employed by Apple Computer, (started July 15 2002) where he is part of the development team responsible for the Safari web browser. Hyatt worked at Netscape Communications from 1997 to 2002 where he contributed and Blake RossBlake Ross is a software developer who is known for working on the Mozilla browsers. In particular he started the Mozilla Firefox project with Dave Hyatt. Blake attended Gulliver Preparatory School in Miami, Florida and was hired to work at Netscape Commu. They perceived the Mozilla browser project as being overly compromised by the commercial requirements of NetscapeNetscape Communications Corporation was the publisher of the Netscape Navigator web browser as well as many other internet and intranet client and server software products. The company was founded as Mosaic Communications Corporation on April 4, 1994 by M's sponsorship, as well as developer-driven feature creep. The pared-down Phoenix browser (as it was then called) was created to combat the perceived software bloat of the Mozilla Suite (codenamed and internally referred to as SeaMonkey), which integrated features such as IRC, mail and news, and WYSIWYG HTML editing in one suite of software. The current lead developer of Firefox is Ben Goodger.
Mozilla Firefox retains the cross-platform nature of the original Mozilla browser, using the XUL user interface language. Use of XUL makes it possible to extend the browser's capabilities through the use of themes ( skins) and extensions. However, the development and installation processes of these add-ons raised security concerns, and with the release of Firefox 0.9, the Mozilla Foundation opened a Mozilla Update website containing "approved" themes and extensions. Use of XUL also sets Firefox apart from other projects based on Mozilla's Gecko layout engine, such as Galeon, Epiphany, K-Meleon, Camino, and most other browsers, which use interfaces native to their respective platforms. Galeon and Epiphany use GTK, K-Meleon uses Windows' MFC, and Camino employs the windowing faculties of Mac OS X.
Firefox was intended to replace for end users the all-in-one Mozilla application suite (SeaMonkey). Although the Mozilla Foundation intended to make the Mozilla Suite obsolete and to replace it with Firefox, the Foundation continues to maintain the suite, as it is used by many corporate users and bundled with other software. However, the developers of the application suite have stripped out several features and much of the interface in an attempt to combat software bloat. Many Mozilla Suite features, such as the IRC client, are optional Firefox extensions.
The official discussion forum for Mozilla Firefox is hosted by MozillaZine, a weblog for Mozilla-related topics. MozillaZine is run by a group of individuals otherwise unaffiliated with the Mozilla Foundation.
On February 5, 2004 the business and IT consulting company AMS categorized Mozilla Firefox (then Firebird) as a "Tier 1" (meaning "Best of Breed") open source product ( Keating, 2004 ). This meant that AMS considered Firebird to be virtually risk-free and technically strong.
The Firefox Logo (source) The project which became Firefox started as an experimental branch of the Mozilla Suite called "mozilla/browser". When sufficiently developed, binaries for public testing appeared in September 2002 under the name "Phoenix".
The "Phoenix" name was retained until April 14, 2003 when it was changed due to trademark issues with the BIOS manufacturer Phoenix Technologies . The new name — "Firebird" — was met with mixed reaction. In late April the Mozilla Foundation issued a statement which stated that the browser should be referred to as "Mozilla Firebird" in order to avoid confusion with the Firebird database server. However, continuing pressure from the open source community forced another change, and on February 9, 2004 Mozilla Firebird was renamed "Mozilla Firefox".
They chose the name "Firefox" for its similarity to "Firebird" but also for its uniqueness in the computing industry. To ensure that no further name changes would be necessary, the Mozilla Foundation began the process of registering Firefox as a trademark with the United States Patent and Trademark Office in December 2003. [7]
| Key: | ||
|---|---|---|
| Old Version | Current Version | Future Version |
| Browser Name | Version | Codename | Release date | Significant changes |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Phoenix | 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 | |
| 0.4 | Oceano | October 19, 2002 | Themes; Pop-up blocking improvements; Toolbar customization | |
| 0.5 | Naples | December 7, 2002 | Multiple homepages; Sidebar and accessibility improvements; History | |
| Firebird | 0.6 | Glendale | May 17, 2003 | New Default Theme (Qute); Bookmark and privacy improvements; Smooth scrolling; Automatic image resizing |
| 0.6.1 | July 28, 2003 | Bugfix release | ||
| 0.7 | Indio | October 15, 2003 | Automatic scrolling; Password manager; Preferences panel improvements | |
| 0.7.1 | Three Kings | October 26, 2003 | Bugfix release (Mac OS X only) | |
| Firefox | 0.8 | Royal Oak | February 9, 2004 | Windows installer; Offline working; Bookmarks and download manager improvements; Rebranded with new (current) logo |
| 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) | |
| 0.9.1 | June 28, 2004 | Bugfix release; updated default theme | ||
| 0.9.2 | July 8, 2004 | Vulnerability patch (Windows only) | ||
| 0.9.3 | August 4, 2004 | Vulnerability patch (All platforms) | ||
| 0.10 (1.0 PR) | Greenlane | September 14, 2004 | ("Preview Release") Bugs with higher complexity/risk, localization impact. Added RSS/ Atom feed support, find toolbar, plugin finder. | |
| 0.10.1 | October 1, 2004 | Vulnerability patch (All platforms) | ||
| 1.0 RC-1 | Mission Bay | October 27, 2004 | First release candidate | |
| 1.0 RC-2 | Whangamata | November 3, 2004 | Second release candidate | |
| 1.0 | Phoenix | November 9, 2004 | Official Version 1.0 release | |
| Upcoming releases | ||||
| 1.1 | Deer Park | March 2005 | Re-sync with Mozilla Trunk. Ongoing HIG compliance work for Aqua, GNOME etc. | |
| 1.5 | ??? | Mid 2005 | First major half of Firefox 2.0 development | |
| 2.0 | ??? | Late 2005 | Second major half of 2.0 development. | |
Three Kings, Royal Oak , One Tree Hill, Mission Bay and Greenlane are all suburbs in Auckland, New Zealand; Whangamata is a small seaside town in the Coromandel Peninsula in New Zealand. The codenames were chosen from these suburb names by Ben Goodger, who grew up in Auckland. The other codenames included in the Firefox roadmap are derived from an actual roadmap of a journey through California to Phoenix, Arizona.[8]
According to Ben Goodger, "Deer Park is not Deer Park, Victoria, but just a symbolic name. I was riding LIRR a few weeks ago and saw the name go by and I thought it sounded nice".
According to the roadmap, future Firefox development will be split over three milestones: version 1.1, version 1.5 and version 2.0. Development for these releases will take place on the Mozilla trunk.
Likely goals for Firefox include:
The next released planned is Firefox 1.1, which is targeted for March 2005.
Early Firefox releases featured an options menu that described cookies in the following way: "Cookies are delicious delicacies."
The phrase was symbolic of the programmers' often quirky sense of humour, and a general reflection of the open source movement's unconventional approach. The phrase became somewhat of a cult legend, and even was featured in an O'Reilly computer book.
However, in a reflection of the growing acceptance and use of the Firefox browser in mainstream internet use the text now reads, "Cookies are pieces of information stored by web pages on your computer. They are used to remember login information and other data." It was viewed that this text would be more helpful for the less technically orientated computer users who were now using Firefox.
The original text was inserted by Blake Ross, a programmer who helped create Firefox. It was replaced by Mike Connor .
After this happened, the following remarks were made by Blake Ross over IRC:
On August 22, 2004, version 0.1 of the Delicious Delicacies extension was released by Jesse Ruderman . This extension restores the old description of cookies. As of November 22, 2004, this extension is in version 0.4.1.
Like Opera and the Mozilla Suite, Mozilla Firefox has some features that differentiate it from other browsers like Internet Explorer. However, it lacks many of the features found in browsers like Opera or the Mozilla Suite, in an effort to combat interface bloat and allow the browser to be customized from a smaller, pared-down browser to meet individual users' needs. Instead of providing all features in the standard distribution, Firefox relies on the extension system to allow advanced users to modify the browser according to their needs.
Firefox supports tabbed browsing, which allows users to open multiple pages in the same window. This feature was carried over from the Mozilla Suite, which had in turn implemented the feature due to wide usage of the MultiZilla extension for SeaMonkey. Until version 1.0, Firefox did not support automatic single-window mode , in which all links which would normally open in a new window were instead opened in a new tab. [24] This feature was introduced in 1.0 after complaints from users migrating from other browsers like Opera or Internet Explorer shells such as Avant Browser. However, there were a number of problems with the feature, and because of this it has been stored in a hidden preference as an experimental feature. Before 1.0, most users who preferred single window mode used extensions such as Tabbrowser Preferences or Tabbrowser Extensions to solve their quandary.
Firefox also includes integrated customizable pop-up blocking. The blocking will block pop-ups from all web sites by default, but can be configured to allow individual sites to show pop-ups. It can also be turned off entirely to allow pop-ups from all sites. Firefox was given this feature early in development, long before Internet Explorer began including a pop-up blocker in the Windows XP "Service Pack 2" release. Firefox's pop-up blocking can be inconvenient at times, however — it blocks all JavaScript-based links from opening a new window while a page is loading.
An integrated customizable download manager is also included. Downloads can be opened automatically depending on the file type, or saved to disk automatically. By default, Firefox downloads all files to a user's desktop on Windows or the user's home directory on Linux, but it can be configured to prompt for a location to download to. The download manager currently does not support cross-session resuming (stopping a download and resuming it after closing the browser). [25] Another issue with the download manager is that it fails to close if small files or files already in the cache are downloaded. [26] When the download manager was first introduced around version 0.8, there was an uproar among users who preferred the old style of individual windows for downloads, akin to that used by Internet Explorer. [9] Initially there was a great demand for an extension to address the issue but this desire quickly diminished.
Powered by RSS or Atom feeds, "Live Bookmarks", another feature of Firefox, allows users to check news sources via their bookmarks. When this feature was first introduced around version 0.9, there were a few worries that Firefox was beginning to include non-essential features and that it was beginning to bloat the browser much like the Mozilla Suite . However, these worries diminished soon after.
Live Bookmarks have surprised many users [10] with their simplicity. Instead of treating RSS-feeds as HTML pages like most news readers do, they are treated as bookmarks that are updated in real-time with a link to an appropriate source.
Firefox also supports a variety of themes/skins for changing its appearance. Themes are coded using XUL. Many themes can be downloaded from the Mozilla Update web site. The default theme was the subject of mass debate when it was changed to a heavily-modified version of Pinstripe (a theme designed with Mac OS X in mind) circa version 0.9 due to licensing issues preventing the theme from being released under the Mozilla Public Licence. Beforehand, Firefox and its predecessors had used the Qute theme, designed by Arvid Axelsson. Axelsson was upset about being notified by Ben Goodger about the theme change only a few days before, and posted the transcript of his dialogue with Goodger on the MozillaZine forums, breaking the news of the theme change before it actually came out. [11] Although a great deal of people criticised the new theme when it was rolled out, eventually the tension subsided. Axelsson continues to produce Qute privately.
An often-touted feature of Firefox is its extensibility. Extensions allow the addition of new features such as mouse gestures, advertisement blocking, debugger tools, and others. Many former Mozilla features such as IRC chat ( ChatZilla), calendar, etc. have become extensions. Although several private sites have sprung up offering extensions for download, the Mozilla Foundation offers a variety of extensions for download on the Mozilla Update site. Most extensions are no more than a few kilobytes in size, making them easily accesible to anyone regardless of connection speed.
There has been some concern about the security of extensions, as if one downloads an extension designed with malicious intent, it may be used to gather information about the user, or worse, compromise the user's computer's security. Eventually, blogger Jesse Ruderman filed a bug report about this vulnerability, and also gave examples of how users could be manipulated into installing extensions without knowing it. [27] The developers responded by giving users a preference to block the installation of any extension — a user has to disable this protection before installing extensions manually — and developing a whitelist of certain sites that an individual user trusts to download extensions from. The dialog for installing an extension also prevents one from clicking the button to install the extension in question for three seconds to ensure that users are not tricked into clicking it accidentally.
All themes and extensions downloaded from the Mozilla Update site may be upgraded through the browser interface itself. This same feature also allows one to download updates to Firefox directly without having to browse to the Mozilla Foundation's website. By comparison, Microsoft's Windows Update will also automatically update Internet Explorer, but this is not integrated into the browser itself; it is a web page that uses an ActiveX control. Alternatively, Microsoft's Automatic Update component automatically updates Internet Explorer in the background but does not require human intervention or actively running Internet Explorer.
Firefox's toolbars and interface are customisable; users can move and manipulate the various buttons, fields, and menus on the toolbars, and also add new toolbars or delete existing ones.
Firefox also can save users' usernames and passwords, making it convenient for them to login to the sites they frequent. However, this password manager comes with a caveat — passwords and usernames are not filled in on a page until the page has finished loading. [28] In addition, Firefox also may save information a user fills into forms — therefore, this makes filling in forms which require information that does not or infrequently changes such as one's name or address more convenient. Both the password manager and the saving of one's form information may be disabled.
Firefox offers a one-click system for deleting one's trail of activities on the web. Cookies, history, saved passwords, cache, saved form information, and download manager history can all be cleared with one button or individually.
Additionally, Firefox stores many hidden preferences that are accessed by typing about:config in the address bar. This is used to enable features like single-window mode and error-pages, or to speed up page rendering by various tweaks. Experimental features like pipelining are often hidden in the about:config menu.
The Mozilla Foundation takes pride in Firefox's compliance with W3C web standards. Firefox supports most basic web standards like the latest revisions of HTML, and quite extensive support for CSS and JavaScript.
It also supports PNG images and variable transparency, something Internet Explorer does not do fully. Indeed, Firefox's support of PNG images has caused much debate around Internet Explorer's standards compliancy, as it is a standard that web developers want to use instead of the old GIF format, which does not have the same capabilities.
Developers are constantly improving Firefox's support of the existing standards. Most of CSS2 and some of the not yet completed CSS3 standard has already been implemented in Firefox.
Work is being done on implementing newer standards like SVG, APNG and Xforms natively into Firefox, as well as building on existing standards by proposing new recommendations like XUL and XBL that are already being used to build Firefox's user interface.
Firefox also has a "find as you type" automatic search feature. When a user types a words while on a web page, Firefox will automatically search for it in the page and highlight the first instance of it that it finds.
There is also a built-in Mycroft web search function with extensible search engine listing; by default, Firefox includes plugins for searching with Google and Yahoo!, and also includes plugins for looking up a word on dictionary.com and browsing through Amazon.com listings. Other popular Mycroft search engines are Wikipedia, eBay, and IMDb.
It should be noted that most of the aforementioned features are not unique to Firefox. Opera, for example, also supports many of these features, but lacks similar extensibility; it is also supported by advertisements — one must pay a fee to remove the advertisements. See also comparison of web browsers.
Users of other browsers have sometimes complained of features and behavior that work differently in Firefox than in the browser they are using.
Many argue that relatively frequently requested yet minor feature requests have not been met. For example, the ability to resize the search bar has been a frequently requested feature but has been frequently turned down. Some of these requests have only been solved when someone creates an extension for it. However, it is commonly argued that the marginal performance degradation when installing an extension is not worth the marginal benefits of having that feature available. Therefore, they argue, that feature should have been included into Firefox by default to avoid the performance hit.[29]
Another complaint is that Firefox is sometimes slow to load pages when using the back and forward buttons. This is a result of issues with the coding in the Mozilla Suite, which was transferred over to Firefox (then Phoenix) when it branched.[30]
Additionally, many users switching from other browsers to Firefox have specific issues with it.
When Firefox has troubles loading a page, for example when it cannot connect to the server, it gives an error dialog box instead of an error page as used in Internet Explorer (this can be configured in about:config). [31]. In addition, instead of displaying the URL of the page which could not be loaded, Firefox displays the URL of the error page (due to this, the developers decided to avoid making error pages the default setting). [32] Ultimately, an extension has been developed that works around this problem.[12]
Another issue found by users coming from Internet Explorer is that the right-click context menu for images, the "View image" option, sounding similar to the "Show image" in Internet Explorer's context menu, loads the image in the current tab or window instead of reloading the image in the page as Internet Explorer would [33]. There is an extension known as "Show image", which duplicates the Internet Explorer behavior.[34]
Firefox's strong ties to standards are causing much worry in the Mozilla community, as the developers' decision not to implement non-standard web technologies developed by Microsoft, such as ActiveX and certain JavaScript functions, has led to some users returning to using Internet Explorer. This is largely due to some sites designing Internet Explorer-specific functionality by using these non-standard technologies. That said, it is possible to add support for ActiveX by the use of a plugin.
Some users find the hassle of having to open Internet Explorer at regular intervals when they find a site that does not work in Firefox too great, and decide to use Internet Explorer by default instead of switching between the two. As a result, an extension was developed that adds a button to the right-click context menu that allows a user to view a page, or any link on a page, in Internet Explorer. [13]
However, some view the lack of ActiveX as a blessing in disguise, as there have been numerous security holes discovered in it in the past. In addition, there are relatively few websites that use ActiveX; the most well-known and perhaps the only frequently accessed site to use ActiveX is the Windows Update site.
Opera users may be perturbed at the fact that Firefox does not have cross-session browsing — where the tabs open when the browser was closed remain when it is reopened by default. Most users either resort to the Tabbrowser Extensions extension or the Session Saver extension to resolve this.[14]
Opera users often expect more features, having come from a browser with many features out of the box. Although many of these features are available as extensions, many Opera users claim that extensions do not offer the same quality as the built-in solutions they can use in speed or reliability.
Some users of the Mozilla Suite point to Firefox's appeal to novice users as being a weakness rather than a strength of the browser. Many advanced configuration options available in the suite are hidden in Firefox, and can only be accessed by hand-editing configuration files or through the about:config interface.
In addition, many argue that it is superfluous to use Firefox combined with the stand-alone Mozilla Thunderbird email client, as the suite offers the same features in a unified package with less memory consumption. Firefox is based on older, stable builds of the Mozilla Suite, and as a consequence, it may not contain new bleeding-edge features found in the development version.
Many people have no problem using both the Suite and Firefox, using the former to keep track of new features and changes to the Gecko engine, and the latter as their default web browser.
The adoption of Firefox has been rapid, given the previously accepted dominance of Microsoft's Internet Explorer in the browser market. According to Mozilla's marketing site, Mozilla Firefox 1.0, launched on November 9, 2004 and available for free from the Firefox homepage, was downloaded over a million times within 24 hours after its 1.0 release. Within 11 days, it had achieved over 5 million downloads. Additionally, more than 3 million people downloaded Firefox 1.0PR in the first 19 days of its release. Since its release on September 14, 2004, over 8 million people total had downloaded 1.0PR. In addition, downloads are still continuing at a rapid rate of approximately 100,000 per day (as of November 8, 2004).
According to a September 2004 report in Tom's Hardware Guide[15], analysts Websidestory reported that 5.2 percent of web users were using the Firefox or Netscape browsers as of late September 2004, a rise of 1.7 percent since June, and that Internet Explorer had lost 1.8 percent of market share in the same period, down to 93.7 percent. Firefox is now targeting a 10% marketshare by the end of 2005.[16] This goal received a boost when a web browser usage survey released on November 24 2004 showed that Firefox usage was now at 4.58 percent, while Internet Explorer's usage was down to 88.9 percent. [17] [18]
Since Firefox is one of the more popular open source applications, it has been referred to as a gateway drug or a Trojan Horse for the adoption of open source software.[19]
Much of Firefox's rapid adoption results from the recent spate of reports of security vulnerabilities in Explorer, as users look for a safer alternative. The count of pro-Firefox security reports and press articles took a notable upswing after the Download.ject attack of June 23, 2004. Although Firefox has had several security vulnerabilities of its own, these were during the beta phase of the project and were fixed relatively quickly. As the distribution of the final version increases, it remains to be seen how robust the browser is in the security field.
Despite Firefox's apparent gains on Internet Explorer, Microsoft head of Australian operations Steve Vamos has stated that Microsoft does not feel Firefox is a threat. He does not feel that Microsoft's users really want the added features of Firefox and says that he never used it personally.[20]
The rapid adoption was apparently accelerated by an active community-marketing campaign dubbed "Spread Firefox" [21]. The campaign encourages its users to add "Get Firefox" links to their website/e-mails, who are given "referrer points" as an incentive. The top 250 referrers are listed on the site [22]. There are also blogs and forums to discuss marketing techniques.
Another publicity idea was introduced by Firefox developer, Blake Ross, which encouraged the Firefox community to file comments on the feedback section of CNET's Download.com website. This allowed the Firefox product to rise to first place on CNET's most popular list of software. [23]
On October 19, 2004, a small announcement went up on the Spread Firefox homepage. It said the group was going to attempt to raise money to publish a full-page advertisement in the New York Times to announce the release of Firefox 1.0. The ad was to be a declaration of independence from Internet Explorer, and would include as signatures the names of all the contributers to the campaign. A goal was set to reach 2500 names. When the ten day fundraising period was over, it was announced that over 10,000 people had contributed, and raised a total of US$250,000, about five times as much as had been expected.
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