Mozilla Firefox, often mistaken as the Mozilla Foxfire browser, is a graphical web browser primarily developed by the Mozilla Corporation. A large number of external contributors also aided in its advent. Officially abbreviated as Fx and FF started as one of the Navigator browser components of the Mozilla Application Suite. Foxfire browser replaced the Mozilla Suite as the chief component of the Mozilla project under the order of the Mozilla Foundation. The current stable release of this browser is version 2.0.0.4, released on May 30, 2007. According to W3Counter, 24.82% of the world's web surfers use a version of firefox browser.



Technical Explanation

Mozilla Firefox browser is a platform independent browser that can be run on Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X and Linux. The source code has unofficially been ported (porting is the transfer of data from one computer to another via a cable that links connecting ports) to other operating systems. These include FreeBSD, OS/2, Solaris, RISC OS, SkyOS, BeOS and Windows XP Professional x64 Edition.

Legal Issues regarding Porting

Since Foxfire browser is free and an open source software, it is freely available. Details of the copyright exemption can be found in the Mozilla tri-license.

Features:

Tabbed browsing, an incremental find (through Find toolbar), live bookmarking, an integrated download manager and a search system are some of the most powerful features of this Internet browser. Foxfire browser can be customized with downloadable extensions, themes, and advanced preferences that are not present in the Options dialog. These can be accessed through the about: config option. For web developers, this browser provides an environment for using built-in tools or extensions like the built-in JavaScript Console and the DOM Inspector. Add-ons like themes for the browser, extensions like Source Editor, Grease Monkey and IE Tab make special tasks easier; they also improve an user browsing experience.

What software standards does it support?

HTML

XML

XHTML

CSS

ECMAScript or JavaScript

DOM

MathML

DTD

XSLT

Xpath

PNG images with alpha transparency

SVG standards

Standard proposals created by WHATWG.

Security Features

SSL/TLS protects communications through this browser with the web servers. This involves strong cryptography when the HTTPS protocol is used.

Gen Nxt

Foxfire browser Version 3.0, based on Gecko 1.9 (layout engine) and the Cairo graphics library (the rendering layer) is expected to hit the market in November 2007. This version shall not run on Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows ME, and Windows NT 4.0 because of a lack of support for Cairo graphics. The Mac version of this browser will only run on OS X 10.3 or higher, but, unlike previous versions, will have a native Cocoa widget interface.

Native support shall also be included in Foxfire browser 3.0 for micro-formats along with the missing features from Foxfire browser 2. This includes the overhauled Places system for storing bookmarks and history in an SQL - like backend.