Mozilla Firefox is a graphical web browser developed by the Mozilla Corporation, and a large community of external contributors. Firefox, officially abbreviated as Fx or fx and popularly abbreviated FF, started as a fork of the Navigator browser component of the Mozilla Application Suite. Firefox has replaced the Mozilla Suite as the flagship product of the Mozilla project, under the direction of the Mozilla Foundation.
Mozilla Firefox is a cross-platform browser, providing support for various versions of Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux. However, the source code has been unofficially ported to other operating systems, including FreeBSD, OS/2, Solaris, RISC OS, SkyOS, BeOS and more recently, Windows XP Professional x64 Edition.
Firefox’s source code is available under the terms of the Mozilla tri-license as free and open source software. The current stable release of Firefox is version 2.0.0.5, released on July 17, 2007.
According to Market Share by Net Applications, 14.55% of the world’s Web browsers used Firefox in June 2007, with 13.92% using version 1.5 or higher.
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 pared-down 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 (Firefox for short).
The Firefox project went through many versions before 1.0 was released on November 9, 2004. In addition to stability and security fixes, the Mozilla Foundation released its first major update to 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.
Features
Features included with Firefox are tabbed browsing, spell checker, incremental find (via the Find toolbar), Live bookmarking, an integrated download manager, and a search system that includes Google. The user can customize Firefox with downloadable extensions, themes, and advanced preferences not present in the Options dialog that are accessible via the about:config page. 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.” Firefox provides an environment for web developers in which they can use built-in tools or extensions. These include the built-in JavaScript Console and the DOM Inspector. One of the most popular features of Firefox is its support for add-ons. These include Themes for the browser, but also extensions like Source Editor, Grease Monkey, and IE Tab which make special tasks easier, and improve browsing experience.
Standards support
| Firefox market share by version June, 2007[22] |
|
|---|---|
| Firefox Betas | 0.03 % |
| Firefox 1.0 | 0.60 % |
| Firefox 1.5 | 2.85 % |
| Firefox 2 | 11.07 % |
| Total | 14.55 % |
Mozilla Firefox supports many software standards, including HTML, XML, XHTML, CSS, ECMAScript (JavaScript), DOM, MathML, DTD, XSLT, XPath, and PNG images with alpha transparency. In addition Firefox supports the SVG standard, however what exists in the current stable version should only be treated as a “technology preview”, as it is not a full implementation. Firefox also supports standards proposals created by the WHATWG such as the offline storage and canvas element. Although Firefox 2 does not pass the Acid2 standards-compliance test, development builds of Firefox 3 do.
Security
Firefox uses SSL/TLS to protect communications with web servers using strong cryptography when using the HTTPS protocol. It uses a sandbox security model and the developers use a “bug bounty” scheme, for finding fixes for some security and feature additions. 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 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, as counted by security researchers. As of July 9, 2007, Firefox 2 has 10 security vulnerabilities unpatched, the most severe of which was rated “less critical” by Secunia. Internet Explorer has seven security vulnerabilities unpatched, the most severe of which was rated “moderately critical” by Secunia. (Note that the number of “Secunia Advisories” listed for each does not reflect the actual number of vulnerabilities reported for each. Advisory SA23282 for Mozilla Firefox 2.0.x contains multiple vulnerabilities.)
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). These licenses permit anyone to view, modify and/or redistribute the source code, and several publicly released applications have been built on it; for example, Netscape, Flock and Songbird make use of code from Firefox.
The official end-user builds of Firefox distributed from mozilla.com are licensed under the Mozilla EULA. Several elements do not 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 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.
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 cannot 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 they will 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.
Trademark and logo issues
The name “Mozilla Firefox” is a registered trademark; along with the official Firefox logo, it may only be used under certain terms and conditions. Anyone may redistribute the official binaries in unmodified form and use the Firefox name and branding for such distribution, but restrictions are placed on distributions which modify the underlying source code.
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.
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 is not 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 restrictions on its use incompatible with the project’s guidelines), they were told by a representative of the Mozilla Foundation that this was not 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 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.
