What Is Firefox

Mozilla Firefox is a free browser developed by Mozilla Corporation and by thousands of open source enthusiasts all over the world. The development of Firefox started on the basis of the Mozilla engine, which was used in Netscape Navigator and was the response of the open source community to the dominating position of the insecure and full of bugs Internet Explorer from Microsoft.

Originally development was started by Dave Hyatt and Blake Ross but soon hundreds of developers worldwide joined them in their efforts to create a fast, reliable, and secure Web browser. The very first preliminary versions of FireFox appeared in September 2002 (under the name Phoenix). The name "Firefox" was adopted on February 9, 2004. Since then several major versions of Firefox have been released and the latest release is FireFox 1.5 (November 2005).

Although a relatively new browser, Firefox is quickly gaining popularity. It is estimated that as of November 2005, its global market share was 9.4%. The market share of Firefox in the USA is about 10%, in Europe it is about 20% and in particular countries (Finland for example) it has reached 40%! The tendency is clear - Firefox is quickly taking shares from other browsers (mainly Internet Explorer) and it can be expected that in a year or two it will be the most popular Web browser.

Firefox is a fast and secure open source browser and is offered for free from the site of Mozilla Firefox. Unlike its predecessor Netscape Communicator, which included an integrated mail client and news reader, FireFox is only a browser, although the Mozilla Foundation develops a separate free open source mail client: Mozilla Thunderbird.

One of the main characteristics of Firefox is that the core browser (which includes the main functionality) is extremely lightweight. Firefox is modular and highly configurable. There are hundreds of themes and extensions, which allow to change its appearance and to add new functionality to it as desired. Firefox is highly configurable and you have options to fine-tune almost every aspect of its functionality.

An indisputable advantage of Firefox is that it is really cross-platform. Firefox is supported for Windows (98, Me, 2000, XP, 2003, etc.), Macintosh, and Linux and generally runs on Solaris, FreeBSD, BeOSm, SkyOS, and many others.

And if English is not your mother tongue and you prefer to use Firefox in a different language, chances are that a translation for your language of choice already exists. If not yet, the tools for internationalization and localization make it an easy task to translate Firefox in any human language.

The myriad of Firefox features, which are dealt in more detail in this article, the ease with which new functionality is added via extensions, its robustness and security and the fact that it is free and open source, have all contributed to turning Firefox into the preferred browser for millions of users worldwide.

If you are new to computers and Internet and you have just bought your PC with Internet Explorer pre-installed on it, you might wonder why make efforts to download and install an alternative browser, when you already have what to browse the Web with. Well, it is not exactly so because Firefox is much better than Internet Explorer in almost any aspect and going to the Mozilla site to download the latest version of Firefox is not difficult at all.

Using Firefox has many advantages. First, if you care about what happens with your sensitive data on the Net and if you are concerned about spyware and adware, you should run away from Internet Explorer as fast as possible. Internet Explorer is known for its security flaws, which can not only steal your data but since Internet Explorer is tightly integrated with the operating system itself, any virus and hacker that manages to get to your computer through one of the hundreds of known security holes in Windows, can literally take over your computer!

Also, if you like being able to change the way an application looks, then certainly Firefox with its many themes (and possibility to further customize an existing theme or even to make your own) is the right choice for you. And if you are interested in the unique features Firefox has or in the hundreds of extensions that are available for it, then switching to Firefox is inevitable!

The list of Firefox features can be incredibly long, if one takes into account its over 1000 extensions but even the core features, that are included in the installation itself, are amazing enough.

Some of the most outstanding features are security-related. Firefox prevents viruses, spyware, and adware from infecting your computer. These are not features one sees onscreen but the benefits of secure browsing are out of question. Firefox also blocks pop-ups and provides a lot for managing personal data, like passwords, financial info, and browsing history, cookies, search history, etc. Firefox boasts also with unique features like tabbed browsing, Live Bookmarks, integrated Google search, etc.

Tabbed browsing is one of the most prominent features of Firefox. It is inherited from Netscape Communicator and is a feature that makes Firefox different from other browsers. Tabbed browsing allows to have a single browser window with multiple Web pages, each of which is opened in a separate tab, which is extremely useful when browsing many pages of one site, for example. There are extensions that allow to have tabs in different colors, to remember the currently opened tabs and to reopen them later, to close separate tabs, etc.

Internationalization and localization support and accessibility are also important features of Firefox, as well as the unlimited opportunities for visual and functional customization, which give users incredible freedom and control over the way their favorite browser works.

Firefox is very different from other browsers, especially from the still dominating Internet Explorer. While Internet Explorer is a genuine security risk, Firefox is a very secure browser. There are occasional reports about security flaws in Firefox and they are solved immediately, while for Internet Explorer even critical security issues are not solved for long time. Security was the major concern that triggered the development of Firefox, as mentioned in the introduction.

The modular design of Firefox is another major difference between it and all other browsers. Being a modular software, Firefox can offer a thin basic version with enough features and incredibly fast performance and give users the opportunity to add through extensions new functionality as desired. This gives Firefox two advantages - first, compared to other browsers (Internet Explorer, Opera, even Netscape Navigator) it is incredibly fast and it does not take ages to load a simple page and second - there is no other browser, which gives so much freedom in choosing what functionality to include!

A difference that cannot be skipped is the way different browsers display pages. Cross-browser compatibility has been a known issue for a decade and this is a kind of difference that Web designers hate. As a result, sometimes there are unprofessionally done sites that do not display correctly in more than one browser, so if you stumble upon such a page, no not blame Firefox for it but rather the designers and developers of that site.