Mozilla Firefox is a web browser descended from the Mozilla Application Suite and managed by Mozilla Corporation. Official versions are distributed under the terms of a proprietary EULA . Firefox had 22.48% of the recorded usage share of web browsers as of April 2009, making it the second most popular browser in terms of current use worldwide, after Internet Explorer.

To display web pages, Firefox uses the Gecko layout engine, which implements some current web standards in addition to a few features which are intended to anticipate likely additions to the standards.

Firefox features include tabbed browsing, a spell checker, incremental find, live bookmarking, a download manager, and an integrated search system that uses the user's desired search engine (Google by default in most localizations). Functions can be added through add-ons, created by third-party developers,addons.mozilla.org Browse all Extensions page of which there is a wide selection, a fact which has attracted many of Firefox's users.

Firefox runs on various versions of Linux, Mac OS X, Microsoft Windows, and many other Unix-like operating systems. Its current stable release is version 3.0.10, released on April 27, 2009. Firefox's source code is free software, released under a tri-license GNU GPL/GNU LGPL/MPL.

History

main: History of Mozilla Firefox

The Firefox project began as an experimental branch of the Mozilla project by Dave Hyatt and Blake Ross. They believed 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 stand-alone 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.

The Firefox project has undergone several name changes. Originally titled Phoenix, it was 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 to avoid confusion with the database software. Continuing pressure from the database server's development community forced another change; on February 9, 2004, Mozilla Firebird became Mozilla Firefox, often referred to as simply Firefox. Mozilla prefers that Firefox be abbreviated as Fx or fx, though it is often abbreviated as FF.

The Firefox project went through many versions before 1.0 was released on November 9, 2004. After a series of stability and security fixes, the Mozilla Foundation released its first major update, Firefox version 1.5, on November 29, 2005. 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 as an extension, and later merged into the program itself. In December 2007, Firefox Live Chat was launched. It allows users to ask volunteers questions through a system powered by Jive Software, with guaranteed hours of operation and the possibility of help after hours.