Mozilla Firefox

Mozilla Firefox

Mozilla Firefox running on Ubuntu, displaying the English Wikipedia main page
Maintainer:	Mozilla Corporation / Mozilla Foundation
Stable release:	2.0  (October 24, 2006) [+/-]
Preview release:	none  (n/a) [+/-]
OS:	Cross-platform
Use:	Web browser
License:	Mozilla EULA for binary redistribution
Website:	http://www.mozilla.com/firefox/

Mozilla Firefox is a graphical web browser developed by the Mozilla Corporation. Started as a fork of the browser component (Navigator) of the Mozilla Application Suite, Firefox has replaced the Mozilla Suite as the flagship product of the Mozilla project, stewarded by the Mozilla Foundation and a large community of external contributors.

Mozilla Firefox is a cross-platform browser, providing support for various versions of Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux. Although not officially released for certain operating systems, the freely available source code works for many other operating systems, including FreeBSD,^[2] OS/2, Solaris, SkyOS, BeOS and more recently, Windows XP Professional x64 Edition.^[3]

Firefox is officially abbreviated as Fx or fx.^[4]

Firefox's source code is freely available under the terms of the Mozilla tri-license as free and open source software. The current stable release of Firefox is version 2.0.0.1, released on 19 December 2006.

History

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.^[5] 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.^[6]

The Firefox project has gone through many name changes through its history. Originally titled Phoenix, it had to be 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 in order to avoid confusion with the database software. Continuing pressure from the database server's development community forced another change, and on February 9 2004, Mozilla Firebird became Mozilla Firefox (or Firefox for short).^[7]

The Firefox project went through many versions before 1.0 was released on November 9 2004. Aside from stability and security fixes, the Mozilla Foundation released one major update to Firefox—version 1.5, on November 29, 2005—before the debut of Firefox 2.

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^[8] as an extension and later merged into the program itself.^[9]

Features

The main features included with Firefox are tabbed browsing, incremental find (via the Find toolbar), Live bookmarking, an integrated download manager, and a search system. The user can customize Firefox with downloadable extensions, a variety of different themes, and many advanced preferences not present in the Options dialog that are accessible via the about:config page.^[10]

The developers of Firefox aimed to produce a browser that "just surfs the web"^[11] and delivers the "best possible browsing experience to the widest possible set of people."^[12]

Firefox also 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.

Standards support

Mozilla Firefox supports many software standards, including, but not restricted to: HTML, XML, XHTML, CSS, ECMAScript (JavaScript), DOM, MathML, DTD, XSLT, XPath, SVG, and PNG images with alpha transparency.^[13] Firefox also supports standards proposals created by the WHATWG such as the canvas element.^[14]

Firefox 2 does not pass the Acid2 standards-compliance test, although current development builds of Firefox 3 pass it.^[15]

Security

Firefox uses SSL/TLS to protect communications with web servers using strong cryptography when using the HTTPS protocol.^[16] It also supports smartcards for secure login to web servers. It uses a sandbox security model^[17] and the developers use a "bug bounty" scheme, for finding fixes for some security^[18] 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. ^[19]

The fact that Firefox has fewer and less severe publicly known unpatched security vulnerabilities than Internet Explorer (see Comparison of web browsers) is often cited as a reason to switch from Internet Explorer to Firefox for improved security.^{[20][21][22][23]} The Washington Post reports that exploit code for critical unpatched security vulnerabilities in Internet Explorer was available for 284 days out of the 365 days in 2006. In comparison, exploit code for critical security vulnerabilities in Firefox was available for only 9 days before Mozilla shipped a patch to remedy the problem.^[24]

A 2006 Symantec study showed that Firefox had surpassed other browsers including Internet Explorer in the number of vendor-confirmed vulnerabilities that year through to September, though these were patched more quickly than vulnerabilities found in IE and other browsers.^[25] Symantec later clarified their statement, saying that Firefox still had fewer security vulnerabilities, as counted by security researchers.^[26] Firefox currently has one security vulnerability marked "less critical" by Secunia.^[27] Internet Explorer has three security vulnerabilities, the most severe of which is marked "moderately critical" by Secunia.^[28]

Licensing

Firefox's source code is open source, 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 upon it; for example, Netscape, Flock and Songbird make use of code from Firefox.

The official end-user builds of Firefox distributed from mozilla.com, however, are licensed under the Mozilla EULA^[29] and contain several elements -- among them the trademarked Firefox name and artwork, and the proprietary Talkback crash reporter -- which do not fall under the scope of the tri-license and whose use is restricted by the terms of the EULA. Because of this, and because the Windows version includes a clickwrap agreement, the Free Software Foundation does not consider these particular builds to be Free software.

In the past, Firefox was licensed solely under the MPL,^[30] 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.^[31][32] 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, in order 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.^[30]

Trademark and logo issues

the globe without fox used in Firefox builds without the official branding switch

When Firefox is built without using the official branding switch (which is only allowed to be used with permission from Mozilla), it is built with the (trademarked and copyrighted) globe and fox logo replaced with a simple blank globe logo and the trademarked Firefox name replaced (at least in the most visible places) with the codename of the release series (deer park for 1.5.x bon echo for 2.0.x).

Linux distributions who want to ship a branded Firefox either have to ship copies of Mozilla's official binaries or come to an agreement with Mozilla. These agreement generally require getting Mozilla's approval for any patches and shipping both the official logos and the Firefox name not just one or the other.

Debian is a somewhat unusual case, having come up with an alternate name (which was also later used by gnuzilla), been given permission to use the Firefox name (despite never using the official logos) and then much later being told that to keep the name they had to comply with much stricter terms that their policies and having to rebrand anyway. See IceWeasel for full details.

Advertising

The rapid adoption of Firefox apparently accelerated in part because of a series of aggressive marketing campaigns since 2004. For example, Blake Ross and Asa Dotzler organized a series of events dubbed "marketing week".

On September 14 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,^[33] which is 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. An e-mail is sent to the nominated friend which provides a hyperlink to download Mozilla Firefox. If the friend downloads the program from this link the nomination is accepted. The names also appear on a website. The link to this website can be found by looking in the credits of the current version of Mozilla Firefox, Firefox 2. The Firefox Wall of Friends can also be found at the World Firefox Day website.

Market adoption

Usage share of Mozilla Firefox over time

Web-surfers have adopted Firefox rapidly, despite the dominance of Internet Explorer in the browser market. Internet Explorer has seen a steady decline of its usage share since Firefox's release. According to several sources, by July 2006, Firefox is the second most used browser with around 12% of global usage share.

Downloads have continued at an increasing rate since Firefox 1.0 was released in November 2004, and as of November 11, 2006 Firefox has been downloaded 250 million times. This number does not include downloads using software updates or from third-party websites.^[34] They do not represent a user count, as one download may be installed on many machines, or one person may download the software multiple times. Mozilla Vice President of Products Christopher Beard estimates that Firefox had 70 million to 80 million users as of October 2006.^[35]

Critical reception

Forbes called Firefox the best browser when it was released in 2004^[36]. PC World named Firefox the "product of the year" in 2005 on their "100 Best Products of 2005" list.^[37] After the release of Firefox 2 and Internet Explorer 7 in 2006, PC World reviewed the two browsers and announced that Firefox was the better browser.^[38]

Internet Week ran an article in which many readers reported high memory usage in Firefox 1.5.^[39] Mozilla developers said the higher memory use of Firefox 1.5 is sometimes at least partially an effect of the new fast backwards and forwards (FastBack) feature.^[40] Other known causes of memory problems are misbehaving extensions, such as Google Toolbar and some old versions of Adblock ^[41] or plug-ins, such as older versions of Adobe Acrobat Reader^[42]. When PC Magazine compared memory usage of Firefox, Opera, and Internet Explorer, they found that Firefox seemed to use only about as much memory as the other browsers.^[43] Tests performed by PC World and Zimbra indicate that Firefox 2 uses less memory than Internet Explorer 7.^[38][44]

Softpedia notes that Firefox takes longer to start up than other browsers^[45] and browser speed tests confirm this to be the case.^[46] IE also launches slightly faster than Firefox on Microsoft Windows since many of its components are built into Windows and are loaded during system startup.^[46]

The Mozilla Corporation's corporate relationship with Google,^[47][48] has been noted in the media, especially with regards to use of Firefox to provide revenues and data for Google. The release of the anti-phishing protection in Firefox 2 especially raised controversy.^[49] Default anti-phishing protection is based on a list that is regularly (approximately each half hour) updated and downloaded to the user's computer^[50] from Google's server (the user is not able to change the data provider within GUI^[51] nor is informed who the default data provider is). The "advanced" security feature of builds by the Mozilla Foundation activate an anti-phishing feature to provide live protection and send each visited URL to Google^[52] (the user must explicitly opt-in for it). Barring Internet privacy issues over such anti-phishing protection, there are concerns on how Google may use the data, even though Firefox's privacy policy states that Google may not use personal information for any purposes other than the anti-phishing protection feature.^[53] On the other hand, Google admits that it "may share aggregated non-personal information with third parties outside of Google".^[54]

In 2005 the Mozilla Foundation and Mozilla Corporation combined had revenue from all sources of $52.9M. The bulk of this revenue was related to their search engine relationships.^[55]

Response from competition

Despite Firefox's apparent gains on Internet Explorer, Microsoft's 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 among Microsoft's users. In contradiction to that statement, many features that previously distinguished Firefox from competitors are now available with Internet Explorer 7. Vamos stated that he himself had never used it.^[56] Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates has used Firefox, but he has commented "so much software gets downloaded all the time, but do people actually use it?"^[57]

A Microsoft SEC filing on June 30 2005 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."^[58]

In August 2006, Microsoft made an offer to Mozilla to help integrate Firefox with the forthcoming Windows Vista,^[59] which Mozilla accepted.^[60] Upon the release of Firefox 2, the Internet Explorer 7 development team shipped a cake to Mozilla as a sign of appreciation.^[61]

Software ecosystem surrounding Firefox

Portable Firefox

Mozilla Firefox - Portable Edition^[62] (also known as Firefox Portable) is a repackaged version of Firefox designed to run from a USB flash drive, MP3 Player, external hard drive, or other portable media. The newest version can also run live from a CD. It arose out of a mozillaZine thread in June 2004. John T. Haller released the first packaged version and has led its further development. It includes a specialized launcher that adjusts extensions and themes to work as it is moved between different computers. There is also a portable version of Firefox available for Macintosh computers called Portable Firefox OS X.^[63]

Add-ons

Firefox's feature set can be augmented by third-party add-ons built from Mozilla technologies and designed to integrate with Firefox seamlessly. The Mozilla Corporation operates the Mozilla Add-ons website, which hosts, audits and categorises popular plugins, extensions, themes and search engines.

The common plugins are Acrobat Reader, Flash Player, Java, Quicktime, RealPlayer, Shockwave, Windows Media Player [3]; there are about one thousand extensions.

The extensions include Venkman, a debugger for JavaScript, and the Web Developer^[64] extension which benefit website authors.

There are a number of extensions that make Firefox more secure. With the NoScript^[65] extension installed, users can fine tune usage of Java and JavaScript, confining permissions to these powerful programming languages to only user-specified pages, and on user specified terms.^[66]

Other security extensions include FlashBlock,^[67] KeyScrambler,^[68], Redirect Remover,^[69] CallingID Link Adviser^[70], ^[71] and CookieSafe.^[72] An extension available for system administrators named Public Fox allows a password to be required for browser changes and unwanted downloads.^[73]

Pipelining

HTTP pipelining is a technique by which multiple HTTP requests are written out to a single socket without waiting for the corresponding responses. Pipelining is only supported in HTTP/1.1, not in 1.0. The pipelining of requests results in a dramatic improvement in page loading times, especially over high latency connections (such as satellite Internet connections).

Although disabled in some browsers such as Internet Explorer, the Firefox browser can be configured for HTTP pipelining "^[74]. Instructions for enabling pipelining can be found here "^[75] can lead to significant improvements in browsing performance.

Future development

This article or section contains information about scheduled or expected future software. The content may change dramatically as the software release approaches and more information becomes available.

According to the roadmap, future Firefox development will include version 3.0. Development on version 3.0, which will be based on Gecko 1.9, occurs simultaneously on the Mozilla trunk. Newer versions of Firefox will use Cairo as the rendering layer instead of GDI+.^[76]

Version 3.0

The development name for Mozilla Firefox 3 is Gran Paradiso.^[77] The precursory releases were codenamed "Minefield", as this was the name of the trunk builds. "Gran Paradiso" (trans. "Big Heaven"), like other Firefox development names, is an actual place; in this case the highest mountain group in the Graian Alps. With the release of version 3.0 alpha 1 on December 8, 2006, it adopted the "Gran Paradiso" codename.^[78] The estimated release date for Firefox 3 is in November 2007.^[79]

The largest change for Firefox 3 currently is the implementation of Gecko 1.9, an updated layout engine. Firefox 3 will also include several new features and some that were bumped from Firefox 2, such as the overhauled Places system for storing bookmarks and history in an SQLite backend.^[80] Due to lack of support for Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows Me, and Windows NT 4.0 in Cairo, and because Microsoft decided to end support for Windows 98 and Windows Me on July 11 2006, Firefox 3 will not run on those operating systems.^[81][82] Unlike previous versions, Firefox 3 on Mac OS X will use a Cocoa widget implementation.^[83]

There is also advanced ongoing work focused on further implementation of features from WHATWG specification.^[84][85][86] In particular, there is implemented and enabled by default^[87] support for controversial^[88][89] "ping"^[90] attribute in <a> and <area> HTML elements. The purpose of this additional attribute is tracking clicking on links.^[90][87] LWN notes that "ping" has advantages over current click-tracking techniques because it can more reliably get the user to their intended destination and the user has the option of turning the "ping" feature off.^[91]

The development team is also asking that Firefox users submit feature requests that they wish to be included in Firefox 3.^[92]

Version 4.0

On October 13 2006, Brendan Eich, Mozilla's Chief Technology Officer, wrote about the plans for Mozilla 2.0, the platform on which Firefox 4 is likely to be based. These changes include improving and removing XPCOM APIs, switching to standard C++ features, just-in-time compilation with JavaScript 2 (known as the Tamarin project), and tool-time and runtime security checks.^[93][94]

References

Further reading

See also

• Browser timeline
• Comparison of web browsers
• List of Firefox extensions
• List of web browsers
• Swiftfox
• Wikipedia:Tools/Browser tools/Mozilla Firefox

External links

Wikinews has news related to:

Mozilla

• Mozilla Firefox homepage for end-users
• Mozilla Firefox project page for developers
• Mozilla EULA
• Firefox changelogs
• Spread Firefox – The center for Firefox marketing
• Secunia.com − Vulnerability report for Mozilla Firefox 1
• Secunia.com − Vulnerability report for Mozilla Firefox 2