Real Estate Web Design - Information

Mozilla Firefox is a free, cross-platform, graphical web browser developed by the Mozilla Corporation and hundreds of volunteers.[1] The browser began as a fork of the Navigator component of the Mozilla Application Suite; Firefox has since become the foundation's main development focus (along with its Thunderbird mail and news client), and has replaced the Mozilla Suite as their official main software release.

Before its 1.0 release, Firefox had already gained acclaim from numerous media outlets, including Forbes[2] and the Wall Street Journal.[3] With over 25 million downloads in the 99 days after the initial 1.0 release, Firefox became one of the most downloaded free and open source applications, especially among home users.[4] On October 19, 2005, Firefox had its 100 millionth download, just 344 days after the release of version 1.0.[5] Firefox 1.5 was released on November 29, 2005, with more than 2 million downloads within the first 36 hours.

Firefox includes an integrated pop-up blocker, tabbed browsing, live bookmarks, support for open standards, and an extension mechanism for adding functionality. Although other browsers have introduced these features, Firefox became the first such browser to achieve wide adoption.

Firefox has attracted attention as an alternative to other browsers such as Microsoft Internet Explorer. As of November 2005, estimates suggest that Firefox's usage share is around 9.4% of overall browser usage (See market adoption), with its highest usage in Finland (about 30%). Since its release, Firefox has contributed to a reduction in Internet Explorer's dominant usage share.

History

For more details on this topic, see History of Mozilla Firefox.

Dave Hyatt and Blake Ross began working on the Firefox project as an experimental branch of the Mozilla project. They believed that 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.

Mozilla Firefox retains the cross-platform nature of the original Mozilla browser by using the XUL user interface markup language. Through Firefox's support of XUL, users may extend their browser's capabilities by applying themes and extensions. Initially, these add-ons raised security concerns, so with the release of Firefox 0.9, the Mozilla Foundation opened Mozilla Update, a website containing themes and extensions "approved" as not harmful.

The Mozilla Foundation had intended to make the Mozilla Suite obsolete and to replace it with Firefox. On March 10, 2005, the Foundation announced that official releases of Mozilla would cease with the 1.7.x series. The Foundation continues to maintain the 1.7.x branch because of its continued use by many corporate users, and because makers of other software still often bundle the product. The Mozilla community (as opposed to the Foundation) will release the next version. These community releases will be called SeaMonkey, and will start out at version 1.0 to avoid any possible confusion for organizations or people still wanting to use the original Mozilla Suite. The Mozilla Foundation will continue giving support (such as CVS hosting) for the Mozilla community developers.

Criticisms

Main articles: Criticisms of Mozilla Firefox, and [[}}]], and [[}}]], and [[}}]], and [[}}]]

Firefox has at times attracted criticism for lacking features found in some other browsers. Many users observe that the developers have not implemented frequently requested features. (The developers state in response that they intend for Firefox to be a fairly minimal browser in order to reduce software bloat and bugs, while retaining a high degree of extensibility.) Most of these features, and many others, exist as installable Firefox extensions, or third-party software. However, not all users wish to install extensions for the features they want, preferring to see them included in the official software package. This difference of opinion was one of the motivating factors behind the development of the Flock browser, which is a Firefox fork.

Some note that Firefox takes longer to launch than other browsers such as Internet Explorer or Opera. The non-platform-native XUL implementation of the user interface may be the cause of this perceived delay. Other Gecko-based browsers such as K-Meleon, which use platform-native user interface implementations, generally run faster than Firefox. IE also launches faster than Firefox as some of its components are loaded on Windows startup. Another mentioned criticism is that a small percentage of users complain of Firefox using much more memory than other browsers. This has been reported as memory leaks [25]; Mozilla developers claim it is sometimes at least partially an effect of blazing fast backwards and forwards (FastBack) feature. [26] Another known frequent cause of memory leaks is misbehaving extensions, most notably Adblock.

Users switching from Internet Explorer sometimes find that certain websites do not render as expected in Firefox. This is rarely a Firefox-specific problem, and is usually the fault of the respective websites using code that does not adhere to W3C standards—such as code specific to Internet Explorer's quirks—or utilizing ActiveX controls or VBScript scripts, which are electively not supported in Firefox for security reasons.

Organization adoption

During the FOSDEM 2005 conference, Tristan Nitot, the president of Mozilla Europe, said that he knew "a few companies" that had deployed the Firefox browser or the Thunderbird mail client across a million seats. Those companies remained reluctant to publicize the migration, due to in-house concerns that this might damage their relationship with Microsoft.[27]

According to a CNET article published on May 12, 2005, about 30,000 of IBM's staff (about 10% of the total) already use Firefox. IBM encourages its employees to use Firefox as the company's standard web browser, with support from the company's help desk staff.

The Networking Services and Information Technology department of the University of Chicago started to include both Firefox and Thunderbird in its connectivity package for all incoming students on the third quarter of 2005.[28]

In December 2005, it was announced that Dell UK were to start shipping the Firefox browser pre-installed on their PCs. [29] Industry adoption

Since the pre-1.0 stages, a number of well-known websites and web applications, including Gmail, have supported (and in some cases, required) the use of Firefox. Since March 30, 2005, the Google search engine has utilized the link prefetching feature of Firefox for faster searching. (Link prefetching involves a standards-compliant optimization technique that utilizes the browser's idle time to download or prefetch documents that the user might visit in the near future.) Google, Inc. also recommends Firefox as the browser for its Blogger.com weblog service.[30] On May 18, 2005, eBay announced support for Firefox for its eBay Picture Manager.[31]

Search engine companies including Google, Yahoo! and A9.com now also offer Firefox extensions for accessing their services, in addition to their original Internet-Explorer add-ons. Google released two new Google Extensions for Firefox on December 14, 2005, further affirming the company's interest in Firefox.

A number of commercialized versions of the Firefox browser have developed outside the not-for-profit Mozilla Foundation. The current version of Netscape, known as Netscape Browser or Netscape 8, combines the functionalities of Firefox and Internet Explorer. And a start-up, Flock (formerly Round Two, MozSource and more formerly E-Flo), plans to build enhancements for Firefox.[32] Firefox is also used by the 3B browser, which browses the web as a 3D city of web sites or a 3D store. Portable Firefox

Portable Firefox is a repackaged version of Firefox designed to run from a USB flash drive, iPod, external hard drive or any other portable media. It arose out of a mozillaZine thread in June of 2004. John T. Haller released the first packaged version and then led development from there. It includes a specialized launcher that adjusts extensions and themes to work as they are moved from computer to computer. It also uses compression (courtesy of UPX and 7-Zip) to reduce the overall footprint and increase speed.

Haller has also started development work on Portable Firefox Live, which aims to run on CD-R or other read-only media. A number of applications are already using Portable Firefox Live to deliver a browser and HTML-based content from CD.

Opinions and responses

Despite Firefox's apparent gains on Internet Explorer, Microsoft head of Australian operations, Steve Vamos, stated that he did not see Firefox as a threat and that there was not significant demand for the featureset of Firefox amongst Microsoft's users. Vamos stated that he himself never used it personally.[33] Even Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates has used Firefox, but he has commented that "so much software gets downloaded all the time, but do people actually use it?"[34]

However, according to a Microsoft SEC Filing on June 30, 2005, it acknowledged that browsers such as Mozilla are competitive threats to Internet Explorer: "Competitors such as Mozilla offer software that competes with the Internet Explorer Web browsing capabilities of our Windows operating system products."[35]