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Firefox redirects here. For other uses, see Firefox (disambiguation).
Mozilla Firefox 1.0 for Windows features a "getting started" link and a "latest headlines" Live Bookmarks feed out of the box.

Mozilla Firefox (originally known as Phoenix and briefly as Mozilla Firebird) is a free web browser developed by the Mozilla Foundation and hundreds of volunteers. Before its 1.0 release on November 9, 2004, Firefox had already garnered a great deal of acclaim from the media, ranging from Forbes to the Wall Street Journal. [1] [2] With over 5 million downloads in the first 12 days of its release and 6 million by November 24, Firefox 1.0 is one of the most-used open source applications among home users. [3]

With Firefox, the Mozilla Foundation aims to develop a small, fast, simple, and highly extensible web browser (separate from the larger Mozilla Suite). Firefox has become the main focus of Mozilla development along with the Mozilla Thunderbird email client and has replaced the Mozilla Suite as the official browser release of the Mozilla Foundation.

Among Firefox's popular features are the integrated pop-up blocker, tabbed browsing, and an extension mechanism for adding additional functionality. Although these features have already been available for some time in other browsers such as the Mozilla Suite and Opera, Firefox is the first of these browsers to have achieved large-scale adoption. Firefox has been targeted to grab around 10% of the market share of Microsoft Internet Explorer (the most popular browser by a large margin as of 2004) by 2005, which many have heralded as the return of the browser wars. [4]

Firefox has attracted attention as an alternative to Internet Explorer as the latter has come under fire for its alleged insecurity—detractors cite its disregard for Web standards, use of the often-dangerous ActiveX component, and vulnerability to spyware and malware installation—and its lack of many features Firefox's proponents consider essential. [5] Microsoft, for its part, has responded that it doesn't feel issues with either security or features are a major concern [6].

History and development

The Firefox project started as an experimental branch of the Mozilla browser project led by Dave Hyatt and Blake Ross. They perceived the Mozilla browser project as being overly compromised by the commercial requirements of Netscape's sponsorship, as well as developer-driven feature creep. The pared-down Phoenix browser (as it was then called) was created to combat the perceived software bloat of the Mozilla Suite (codenamed and internally referred to as SeaMonkey), which integrated features such as IRC, mail and news, and WYSIWYG HTML editing in one suite of software. The current lead developer of Firefox is Ben Goodger.

Mozilla Firefox retains the cross-platform nature of the original Mozilla browser, using the XUL user interface language. Use of XUL makes it possible to extend the browser's capabilities through the use of themes (skins) and extensions. However, the development and installation processes of these add-ons raised security concerns, and with the release of Firefox 0.9, the Mozilla Foundation opened a Mozilla Update website containing "approved" themes and extensions. Use of XUL also sets Firefox apart from other projects based on Mozilla's Gecko layout engine, such as Galeon, Epiphany, K-Meleon, Camino, and most other browsers, which use interfaces native to their respective platforms. Galeon and Epiphany use GTK, K-Meleon uses Windows' MFC, and Camino employs the windowing faculties of Mac OS X. Many of these projects were started before Firefox, and probably served as inspiration.

The first sign of a Firefox-like project was Raptor, a small application sample (presumably to demonstrate how to embed Gecko in another application) shipped with early milestone builds of Mozilla. Featuring only "back", "forward", "stop" buttons and an URL field (no cache, no stored history, etc.), it was minimalistic and thus a lot lighter than Mozilla itself. Eventually, Raptor stopped shipping with Mozilla's binary builds.

Firefox was intended to replace for end users the all-in-one Mozilla application suite (SeaMonkey). Although the Mozilla Foundation intended to make the Mozilla Suite obsolete and to replace it with Firefox, the Foundation continues to maintain the suite, as it is used by many corporate users and bundled with other software. However, the developers of the application suite have stripped out several features and much of the interface in an attempt to combat software bloat. Many Mozilla Suite features, such as the IRC client, are optional Firefox extensions.

The official discussion forum for Mozilla Firefox is hosted by MozillaZine, a weblog for Mozilla-related topics. MozillaZine is run by a group of individuals otherwise unaffiliated with the Mozilla Foundation.

On February 5, 2004 the business and IT consulting company AMS categorized Mozilla Firefox (then Firebird) as a "Tier 1" (meaning "Best of Breed") open source product (Keating, 2004). This meant that AMS considered Firebird to be virtually risk-free and technically strong.

Naming

The Firefox Logo (source)
The Firefox Logo (source)

The project which became Firefox started as an experimental branch of the Mozilla Suite called "mozilla/browser". When sufficiently developed, binaries for public testing appeared in September 2002 under the name "Phoenix".

The "Phoenix" name was retained until April 14, 2003 when it was changed due to trademark issues with the BIOS manufacturer Phoenix Technologies. The new name — "Firebird" — was met with mixed reaction. In late April the Mozilla Foundation issued a statement which stated that the browser should be referred to as "Mozilla Firebird" in order to avoid confusion with the Firebird database server. However, continuing pressure from the open source community forced another change, and on February 9, 2004 Mozilla Firebird was renamed "Mozilla Firefox".

They chose the name "Firefox" for its similarity to "Firebird" but also for its uniqueness in the computing industry. To ensure that no further name changes would be necessary, the Mozilla Foundation began the process of registering Firefox as a trademark with the United States Patent and Trademark Office in December 2003. [7]

The repeated renaming of the program prompted the development of the tongue-in-cheek plug-in "Firesomething" [8], which could randomly rename the browser each time it was executed to (for example) "Firebadger" or "Firegiraffe".

Release history

Key:
Old Version Current Version Future Version
Browser Name Version Codename Release date Significant changes
Phoenix 0.1 Pescadero September 23, 2002 First release. Customizable toolbar; quicksearch.
0.2 Santa Cruz October 1, 2002 Sidebar; Extension management.
0.3 Lucia October 14, 2002 Image blocking; Pop-up blocking whitelist; Tabbed browsing
0.4 Oceano October 19, 2002 Themes; Pop-up blocking improvements; Toolbar customization
0.5 Naples December 7, 2002 Multiple homepages; Sidebar and accessibility improvements; History
Firebird 0.6 Glendale May 17, 2003 New Default Theme (Qute); Bookmark and privacy improvements; Smooth scrolling; Automatic image resizing
0.6.1 July 28, 2003 Bugfix release
0.7 Indio October 15, 2003 Automatic scrolling; Password manager; Preferences panel improvements
0.7.1 Three Kings October 26, 2003 Bugfix release (Mac OS X only)
Firefox 0.8 Royal Oak February 9, 2004 Windows installer; Offline working; Bookmarks and download manager improvements; Rebranded with new (current) logo
0.9 One Tree Hill June 15, 2004 New Default Theme (Winstripe); Comprehensive data migration; New extension/theme manager; Reduced download size; New help system; Linux installer; Mail Icon (Windows only)
0.9.1 June 28, 2004 Bugfix release; updated default theme
0.9.2 July 8, 2004 Vulnerability patch (Windows only)
0.9.3 August 4, 2004 Vulnerability patch (All platforms)
0.10
(1.0 PR) 		Greenlane September 14, 2004 ("Preview Release") Bugs with higher complexity/risk, localization impact. Added RSS/Atom feed support, find toolbar, plugin finder.
0.10.1 October 1, 2004 Vulnerability patch (All platforms)
1.0 RC-1 Mission Bay October 27, 2004 First release candidate
1.0 RC-2 Whangamata November 3, 2004 Second release candidate
1.0 Phoenix November 9, 2004 Official Version 1.0 release
Upcoming releases
1.1 Deer Park March 2005 Re-sync with Mozilla Trunk. Ongoing HIG compliance work for Aqua, GNOME etc.
1.5 ??? Mid 2005 First major half of Firefox 2.0 development
2.0 ??? Late 2005 Second major half of 2.0 development.

Three Kings, Royal Oak, One Tree Hill, Mission Bay and Greenlane are all suburbs in Auckland, New Zealand; Whangamata is a small seaside town in the Coromandel Peninsula in New Zealand. The codenames were chosen from these suburb names by Ben Goodger, who grew up in Auckland. The other codenames included in the Firefox roadmap are derived from an actual roadmap of a journey through California to Phoenix, Arizona.[9]

According to Ben Goodger, "Deer Park is not Deer Park, Victoria, but just a symbolic name. I was riding LIRR a few weeks ago and saw the name go by and I thought it sounded nice".

Future development

According to the roadmap, future Firefox development will be split over three milestones: version 1.1, version 1.5 and version 2.0. Development for these releases will take place on the Mozilla trunk.

Likely goals for Firefox include:

  • Bookmark and History improvements
  • Specific options per-site
  • Extension system enhancements
  • Find Toolbar, Software Update, Search enhancements
  • Accessibility compliance

The next release planned is Firefox 1.1, which is targeted for March 2005.

Delicious delicacies

File:Fxcookies2.png
A screenshot showing the "cookies are delicious delicacies" line

Early Firefox releases featured an options menu that described cookies in the following way: "Cookies are delicious delicacies."

The phrase was symbolic of the programmers' often quirky sense of humour, and a general reflection of the open source movement's unconventional approach. The phrase became something of a cult legend, and was even featured in an O'Reilly computer book.

However, in a reflection of the growing acceptance and use of the Firefox browser in mainstream internet use the text now reads, "Cookies are pieces of information stored by web pages on your computer. They are used to remember login information and other data." The revision was regarded as more likely to be helpful for the less technically oriented computer users who were now using Firefox.

The original text was inserted by Blake Ross, a programmer who helped create Firefox. It was replaced by Mike Connor.

After this happened, the following remarks were made by Blake Ross over IRC:

<blake2> congratulations mconnor
<blake2> you just destroyed a legend!

On August 22, 2004, version 0.1 of the Delicious Delicacies extension was released by Jesse Ruderman. This extension restores the old description of cookies. As of November 22, 2004, this extension is in version 0.4.1.

Features

Like Opera and the Mozilla Suite, Mozilla Firefox has some features that differentiate it from other browsers like Internet Explorer. However, it lacks many of the features found in browsers like Opera or the Mozilla Suite, in an effort to combat interface bloat and allow the browser to be customized from a smaller, pared-down browser to meet individual users' needs. Instead of providing all features in the standard distribution, Firefox relies on the extension system to allow advanced users to modify the browser according to their needs.

Tabbed browsing

Firefox supports tabbed browsing, which allows users to open multiple pages in the same window. This feature was carried over from the Mozilla Suite, which had in turn implemented the feature due to wide usage of the MultiZilla extension for SeaMonkey. Until version 1.0, Firefox did not support automatic single-window mode, in which all links which would normally open in a new window were instead opened in a new tab. [10] This feature was introduced in 1.0 after complaints from users migrating from other browsers like Opera or Internet Explorer shells such as Avant Browser. However, there were a number of problems with the feature, and because of this it has been stored in a hidden preference as an experimental feature. Before 1.0, most users who preferred single window mode used extensions such as Tabbrowser Preferences or Tabbrowser Extensions to solve their quandary.

Pop-up blocking

Firefox also includes integrated customizable pop-up blocking. The blocking will block pop-ups from all web sites by default, but can be configured to allow individual sites to show pop-ups. It can also be turned off entirely to allow pop-ups from all sites. Firefox was given this feature early in development, long before Internet Explorer began including a pop-up blocker in the Windows XP "Service Pack 2" release. Firefox's pop-up blocking can be inconvenient at times, however — it blocks all JavaScript-based links from opening a new window while a page is loading.

Download manager

An integrated customizable download manager is also included. Downloads can be opened automatically depending on the file type, or saved to disk automatically. By default, Firefox downloads all files to a user's desktop on Windows or the user's home directory on Linux, but it can be configured to prompt for a location to download to. The download manager currently does not support cross-session resuming (stopping a download and resuming it after closing the browser). [11] Another issue with the download manager is that it fails to close if small files or files already in the cache are downloaded. [12] When the download manager was first introduced around version 0.8, there was an uproar among users who preferred the old style of individual windows for downloads, akin to that used by Internet Explorer. [13] Initially there was a great demand for an extension to address the issue but this desire quickly diminished.

Live Bookmarks

Powered by RSS or Atom feeds, "Live Bookmarks", another feature of Firefox, allows users to check news sources via their bookmarks. When this feature was first introduced in version 1.0 PR, there were a few worries that Firefox was beginning to include non-essential features and that it was beginning to bloat the browser much like the Mozilla Suite. However, these worries diminished soon after.

Live Bookmarks have surprised many users [14] with their simplicity. Instead of treating RSS-feeds as HTML pages like most news readers do, they are treated as bookmarks that are updated in real-time with a link to an appropriate source.

Themes

Firefox also supports a variety of themes/skins for changing its appearance. Themes are coded using XUL. Many themes can be downloaded from the Mozilla Update web site. The default theme was the subject of mass debate when it was changed to a heavily-modified version of Pinstripe (a theme designed with Mac OS X in mind) circa version 0.9 due to licensing issues preventing the theme from being released under the Mozilla Public Licence. Beforehand, Firefox and its predecessors had used the Qute theme, designed by Arvid Axelsson. Axelsson was upset about being notified by Ben Goodger about the theme change only a few days before, and posted the transcript of his dialogue with Goodger on the MozillaZine forums, breaking the news of the theme change before it actually came out. [15] Although a great deal of people criticised the new theme when it was rolled out, eventually the tension subsided. Axelsson continues to produce Qute privately.

Extensions

An often-touted feature of Firefox is its extensibility. Extensions allow the addition of new features such as mouse gestures, advertisement blocking, debugger tools, and others. Many former Mozilla features such as IRC chat (ChatZilla), calendar, etc. have become extensions. Although several private sites have sprung up offering extensions for download, the Mozilla Foundation offers a variety of extensions for download on the Mozilla Update site. Most extensions are no more than a few kilobytes in size, making them easily accesible to anyone regardless of connection speed.

There has been some concern about the security of extensions, as if one downloads an extension designed with malicious intent, it may be used to gather information about the user, or worse, compromise the user's computer's security. Eventually, blogger Jesse Ruderman filed a bug report about this vulnerability, and also gave examples of how users could be manipulated into installing extensions without knowing it. [16] The developers responded by giving users a preference to block the installation of any extension — a user has to disable this protection before installing extensions manually — and developing a whitelist of certain sites that an individual user trusts to download extensions from. The dialog for installing an extension also prevents one from clicking the button to install the extension in question for three seconds to ensure that users are not tricked into clicking it accidentally.

All themes and extensions downloaded from the Mozilla Update site may be upgraded through the browser interface itself. This same feature also allows one to download updates to Firefox directly without having to browse to the Mozilla Foundation's website. By comparison, Microsoft's Windows Update will also automatically update Internet Explorer, but this is not integrated into the browser itself; it is a web page that uses an ActiveX control. Alternatively, Microsoft's Automatic Update component automatically updates Internet Explorer in the background but does not require human intervention or actively running Internet Explorer.

Preferences and privacy

Firefox's toolbars and interface are customisable; users can move and manipulate the various buttons, fields, and menus on the toolbars, and also add new toolbars or delete existing ones.

Firefox also can save users' usernames and passwords, making it convenient for them to login to the sites they frequent. However, this password manager comes with a caveat — passwords and usernames are not filled in on a page until the page has finished loading. [17] In addition, Firefox also may save information a user fills into forms — therefore, this makes filling in forms which require information that does not or infrequently changes such as one's name or address more convenient. Both the password manager and the saving of one's form information may be disabled.

Firefox offers a one-click system for deleting one's trail of activities on the web. Cookies, history, saved passwords, cache, saved form information, and download manager history can all be cleared with one button or individually.

Additionally, Firefox stores many hidden preferences that are accessed by typing about:config in the address bar. This is used to enable features like single-window mode and error-pages, or to speed up page rendering by various tweaks. Experimental features like HTTP pipelining are often hidden in the about:config menu.

Standards

The Mozilla Foundation takes pride in Firefox's compliance with W3C web standards. Firefox supports most basic web standards like the latest revisions of HTML, and quite extensive support for CSS and JavaScript.

It also supports PNG images and variable transparency, something Internet Explorer does not do fully. Indeed, Firefox's support of PNG images has caused much debate around Internet Explorer's standards compliancy, as it is a standard that web developers want to use instead of the old GIF format, which does not have the same capabilities.

Developers are constantly improving Firefox's support of the existing standards. Most of CSS2 and some of the not yet completed CSS3 standard has already been implemented in Firefox.

Work is being done on implementing newer standards like SVG, APNG and Xforms natively into Firefox, as well as building on existing standards by proposing new recommendations like XUL and XBL that are already being used to build Firefox's user interface.

Other features

Firefox also has a "find as you type" automatic search feature. When a user types a word while on a web page, Firefox will automatically search for it in the page and highlight the first instance found.

There is also a built-in Mycroft web search function with extensible search engine listing; by default, Firefox includes plugins for searching with Google and Yahoo!, and also includes plugins for looking up a word on dictionary.com and browsing through Amazon.com listings. Other popular Mycroft search engines are Wikipedia, eBay, and IMDb.

It should be noted that most of the aforementioned features are not unique to Firefox. Opera, for example, also supports many of these features, but lacks similar extensibility; it is also supported by advertisements — one must pay a fee to remove the advertisements. See also comparison of web browsers.

Criticisms

Many argue that relatively frequently requested yet minor feature requests have not been met. For example, the ability to resize the search bar has been a frequently requested feature but has been frequently turned down. Some of these requests have only been solved when someone creates an extension for it. However, it is commonly argued that the marginal performance degradation when installing an extension is not worth the marginal benefits of having that feature available. Therefore, they argue, that feature should have been included into Firefox by default to avoid the performance hit.[18]

Another complaint is that Firefox is sometimes slow to load pages when using the back and forward buttons. This is a result of issues with the coding in the Mozilla Suite, which was transferred over to Firefox (then Phoenix) when it branched.[19]

Additionally, many users switching from other browsers to Firefox have specific issues with it.

Criticisms from Internet Explorer users

When Firefox has troubles loading a page, for example when it cannot connect to the server, it gives an error dialog box instead of an error page as used in Internet Explorer (this can be configured in about:config). [20]. In addition, instead of displaying the URL of the page which could not be loaded, Firefox displays the URL of the error page (due to this, the developers decided to avoid making error pages the default setting). [21] Ultimately, an extension has been developed that works around this problem.[22]

Another issue found by users coming from Internet Explorer is that the right-click context menu for images, the "View image" option, sounding similar to the "Show image" in Internet Explorer's context menu, loads the image in the current tab or window instead of reloading the image in the page as Internet Explorer would [23]. There is an extension known as "Show image", which duplicates the Internet Explorer behavior.[24] Many IE users choose to use an Internet Explorer shell to make their feature set similar to that of Firefox while maintaining the compatibility of Trident, Internet Explorer's rendering engine.

ActiveX

Firefox's strong ties to standards are causing much worry in the Mozilla community, as the developers' decision not to implement non-standard web technologies developed by Microsoft, such as ActiveX and certain JavaScript functions, has led to some users returning to using Internet Explorer. This is largely due to some sites designing Internet Explorer-specific functionality by using these non-standard technologies. That said, it is possible to add support for ActiveX by the use of a plugin.

Some users find the hassle of having to open Internet Explorer at regular intervals when they find a site that does not work in Firefox too great, and decide to use Internet Explorer by default instead of switching between the two. As a result, an extension was developed that adds a button to the right-click context menu that allows a user to view a page, or any link on a page, in Internet Explorer. [25]

However, some view the lack of ActiveX as a blessing in disguise, as there have been numerous security holes discovered in it in the past. In addition, there are relatively few websites that use ActiveX; the most well-known and perhaps the only frequently accessed site to use ActiveX is the Windows Update site.

Criticisms from Opera users

Opera users may be perturbed at the fact that Firefox does not have cross-session browsing — where the tabs open when the browser was closed remain when it is reopened by default. Most users either resort to the Tabbrowser Extensions extension or the Session Saver extension to resolve this.[26]

Opera users often expect more features, having come from a browser with many features out of the box. Although many of these features are available as extensions, many Opera users claim that extensions do not offer the same quality as the built-in solutions they can use in speed or reliability.

Criticisms from Mozilla Suite users

Some users of the Mozilla Suite point to Firefox's appeal to novice users as being a weakness rather than a strength of the browser. Many advanced configuration options available in the suite are hidden in Firefox, and can only be accessed by hand-editing configuration files or through the about:config interface.

In addition, many argue that it is superfluous to use Firefox combined with the stand-alone Mozilla Thunderbird email client, as the suite offers the same features in a unified package with less memory consumption. Firefox is based on older, stable builds of the Mozilla Suite, and as a consequence, it may not contain new bleeding-edge features found in the development version. However, Firefox's developers are planning that in the future, Firefox will periodically have its code 'refreshed' from the Mozilla trunk.

Many people have no problem using both the Suite and Firefox, using the former to keep track of new features and changes to the Gecko engine, and the latter as their default web browser.

Market adoption

The adoption of Firefox has been rapid, given the previously accepted dominance of Microsoft's Internet Explorer in the browser market. According to Mozilla's marketing site, Mozilla Firefox 1.0, launched on November 9, 2004 and available for free from the Firefox homepage, was downloaded over a million times within 24 hours after its 1.0 release. Within 11 days, it had achieved over 5 million downloads. Additionally, more than 3 million people downloaded Firefox 1.0PR in the first 19 days of its release. Since its release on September 14, 2004, over 8 million people total had downloaded 1.0PR. In addition, downloads are still continuing at a rapid rate of approximately 100,000 per day (as of November 8, 2004).

According to a September 2004 report in Tom's Hardware Guide[27], analysts Websidestory reported that 5.2 percent of web users were using the Firefox or Netscape browsers as of late September 2004, a rise of 1.7 percent since June, and that Internet Explorer had lost 1.8 percent of market share in the same period, down to 93.7 percent. Firefox is now targeting a 10% marketshare by the end of 2005.[28] This goal received a boost when a web browser usage survey released on November 24 2004 showed that Firefox usage was now at 4.58 percent, while Internet Explorer's usage was down to 88.9 percent. [29] [30]

Since Firefox is one of the more popular open source applications, it has been referred to as a gateway drug or a Trojan Horse for the adoption of open source software.[31]

Much of Firefox's rapid adoption results from the recent spate of reports of security vulnerabilities in Explorer, as users look for a safer alternative. The count of pro-Firefox security reports and press articles took a notable upswing after the Download.ject attack of June 23, 2004. Although Firefox has had several security vulnerabilities of its own, these were during the beta phase of the project and were fixed relatively quickly. As the distribution of the final version increases, it remains to be seen how robust the browser is in the security field.

Despite Firefox's apparent gains on Internet Explorer, Microsoft head of Australian operations Steve Vamos has stated that Microsoft does not feel Firefox is a threat. He does not feel that Microsoft's users really want the added features of Firefox and says that he never used it personally.[32]

Spread Firefox campaign

The rapid adoption was apparently accelerated by an active community-marketing campaign dubbed "Spread Firefox" [33]. The campaign encourages its users to add "Get Firefox" links to their website/e-mails, who are given "referrer points" as an incentive. The top 250 referrers are listed on the site [34]. There are also blogs and forums to discuss marketing techniques.

Another publicity idea was introduced by Firefox developer, Blake Ross, which encouraged the Firefox community to file comments on the feedback section of CNET's Download.com website. This allowed the Firefox product to rise to first place on CNET's most popular list of software. [35]

On October 19, 2004, a small announcement went up on the Spread Firefox homepage. It said the group was going to attempt to raise money to publish a full-page advertisement in the New York Times to announce the release of Firefox 1.0. The ad was to be a declaration of independence from Internet Explorer, and would include as signatures the names of all the contributers to the campaign. A goal was set to reach 2500 names. When the ten day fundraising period was over, it was announced that over 10,000 people had contributed, and raised a total of US$250,000, about five times as much as had been expected. The advertisement is expected to be published in early December 2004.

See also

References

Firefox
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