History Of Mozilla Firefox Web Browser.

The Firefox project was started as an experiment under the Mozilla project by Dave Hyatt and Blake Ross. According to them, the creeping featurism and commercial aspects of Netscape’s sponsorship resulted in unsatisfactory performance of the Mozilla browser. They believed that the Mozilla suite was full of bloatware or newer, larger software with no significant benefits over the older versions. Their emphasis was on creating a better browser to replace the Mozilla Suite. Consequently, the Mozilla Organization announced a shift in focus to Firefox and Thunderbird from the previous pivotal product, Mozilla Suite on April 3, 2003.

Starting with the name Phoenix, the Firefox project has been assigned several names. After facing trademark problems with Phoenix Technologies, the Firefox project was renamed as Firebird. This title was challenged by the Firebird free database software project as it resulted in confusion between the two separate projects. On February 9, 2004, the Mozilla Foundation finally settled on the name Mozilla Firefox for the new browser.

By the time version 1.0 was released on November 9, 2004, the Firefox project had already gone through many versions of the browser. The first key update was released as Firefox 1.5 on November 29, 2005 followed by Firefox 2 on October 24, 2006. This included updates in security and stability features with version 1.5 and updated GUI, search, tabbed browsing settings, spell check, extension manager, new session restore feature and anti-phishing techniques with version 2. The anti-phishing feature was adopted by Google as an extension and eventually, went on to merge into the program itself.

Introduction to Mozilla Firefox

Mozilla Firefox is a web browser built by the Mozilla Corporation and a large number of volunteers. Originally, Firefox was a fork or a distinct software piece of the Netscape Navigator element of the Mozilla Application Suite. The suite has now been substituted by Firefox as the most significant product of the Mozilla Project.

Mozilla Firefox is capable of working on multiple computer platforms and support diverse versions of Microsoft Windows, Linux, PowerPC and Mac OS X. This multi platform software can run on all or more than one such platforms. On the other hand, other operating systems like Solaris, OS/2, SkyOS, FreeBSD and Windows XP Professional x64 Edition have been used as unofficial ports to the source code.

The Firefox code can be found as FOSS (free and open source software) included in the terms of Mozilla tri-license. Version 2.0.0.7 is the latest release of Firefox and was launched on September 18, 2007.

In August 2007, Firefox was used by 14.56% of the world’s Web Browsers, version 1.5 or higher being used by 14.05% of them. These statistics have been provided by the Market Share by Net Applications Report under Netapplications.com.