What is Firefox and What Does it Do?

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What is Firefox and What Does it Do?

by: admin on Tue, 13 Oct 2009 at: 6:22 PM Go to: Previous Article Next Article

Mozilla Firefox is a free and open source web browser derived from the Mozilla Application Suite and managed by Mozilla Corporation. Firefox has 23.76% of the recorded usage share of web browsers as of Sept 2009, making it the second most popular browser in terms of current use worldwide after Microsoft's Internet Explorer.To show web pages, Firefox employs the Gecko layout engine, which implements most current web standards as well as several characteristics that are designated to anticipate expected add-ons to the standards.Latest Firefox characteristics include tabbed browsing, spell checking, incremental find, live bookmarking, a download manager, private browsing, location-aware browsing (aka "geolocation") based entirely on a Google service and an integrated search system that uses Google by default in most localisations. Functions can be added via add-ons, made by third-party developers, of which there's an extensive choice, a characteristic that has pulled in many of Firefox's users.Firefox runs on several variants of Mac OS X, Microsoft Windows, Linux, and several other Unix-like OSs. Its current stable release is version 3.5.3, released on September 9, 2009. Firefox's source code is free software, released under a tri-license GNU GPL/GNU LGPL/MPL.The Firefox project started out as an experimental subdivision of the Mozilla project by Dave Hyatt and Blake Ross. They considered the commercialised requisites of Netscape's sponsorship and developer-driven feature creep compromised the public utility of the Mozilla browser. To fight what they saw as the Mozilla Suite's software package bloat, they produced a stand-alone browser, with which they planned to substitute the Mozilla Suite. On April 3, 2003, the Mozilla Organization annunciated that they planned to change their focus from the Mozilla Suite to Firefox and Thunderbird.The Firefox project has gone through numerous name changes. In the beginning named Phoenix, it was renamed due to of trademark issues with Phoenix Technologies. The substitute name, Firebird, aroused a deep reaction from the Firebird free database software project. In response, the Mozilla Foundation stated that the browser ought to always carry the name Mozilla Firebird to nullify mix-up with the database software. Continued insistence from the database server's development community pushed another alteration; on February 9, 2004, Mozilla Firebird turned Mozilla Firefox, frequently named simply Firefox. Mozilla opts that Firefox be shortened as Fx or fx, although it is frequently abbreviated as FF. The Firefox project carried out several versions before 1.0 was released on Nov 9, 2004. After a series of stability and security fixes, the Mozilla Foundation released its 1st major update, Firefox version 1.5, on Nov 29, 2005.