What is Mozilla Firefox?

Mozilla Firefox is an open-source and free software web browser developed by the Mozilla Authority. This project comes from the Mozilla Application Suite, which ended on March 10, 2005.

What is Mozilla Firefox Web Browser?

The project has thousands of collaborations around the world, allowing any errors to be detected and corrected quickly.

According to W3Schools, until March 2012, Firefox ranked second (36.3%) after Google Chrome (37.3%) in terms of Internet users’ choice.

Web market share ranks second after the browser set of Internet Explorer versions, with 54% of the market and 20% in terms of browser usage.

With a usage preference of 69.4%, Cuba was one of the countries that used this scanner the most in 2011.

Firefox History

Netscape Navigator was the dominant web browser on the market until Microsoft’s advent of Internet Explorer.

In January 1998, Netscape launched the open-source Mozilla project, which was put into the Netscape Public License, similar to the GNU General Public License.

The Firefox project started as an experimental branch of Mozilla by Dave Hyatt, Joe Hewitt, and Blake Ross, believing that Netscape’s sponsorship endangered the commercial demands and usefulness of the many features of the Mozilla Application Suite.

Then, they decided to create a separate browser, and on April 3, 2003, a few people announced that they would focus their efforts on the Firefox browser.

The Mozilla Foundation, a non-profit organization dedicated to free software creation, was launched on July 15, 2003, to ensure that the Mozilla project continues beyond the involvement of individual volunteers.

First Versions of Mozilla Firefox

There are portable versions of Windows Firefox available from USB memory.

Firefox has also had a version for mobile phones and PDAs called Fennec since 2010.

On March 29, 2011, version 4 was released for Android and Maemo, with the ability to sync user data for the desktop version of Firefox using Firefox Sync.

There are expanded supported versions released independently from the accelerated cycle calendar and released about every 12 months.

Firefox Quantum

Firefox 57 (Firefox Quantum) is faster. Even if you have multiple tabs open and are running interactive applications such as maps and email clients, pages are usually loaded in the blink of an eye.

Thanks to a new rendering engine known as Quantum that replaces the Gecko engine running previous versions of Firefox, the speed increases are high, whether it’s a web page load times or a browser response when typing a URL in the address bar.

It is optimized to perform better on more modern hardware and, for the first time, allows Firefox to leverage multiple cores to split rendering tasks.

Beyond performance improvements, cleaner and more modern than regular Firefox, which we are accustomed to, Firefox’s design has been updated with Quantum.

The boxes and icons are clarified, and the interface edges are softened. The default theme offers a good contrast between the active tab and others that are open while contrasting with the browser itself.

The preferences page also improves a bit, but most of the improvements already appear to be available in previous versions of Firefox. The settings are presented clearly, well-spaced, and minimally, and the Extensions and Themes pages look the same.

There’s not much you can do to change the look of a browser; it’s basically a window to the web, but Quantum adds simplicity.

Firefox Quantum consumes 30% less RAM than Chrome, which can make a difference when you open dozens of tabs on a PC with bottleneck fully available RAM.

Characteristics

More efficient use of JavaScript objects that allow the use of ECMAScript5 and based on the JägerMonkey JavaScript engine provides performance enhancements that make version 12.0 the most powerful.

It allows synchronization between different devices, allowing it to connect to mobile devices and desktop browsers to access browsing history and browse from a mobile phone with the same open tabs and passwords saved in the desktop application.

The add-on manager has been redesigned to allow you to discover and install add-ons while using Firefox.

The download manager has been redesigned, allowing you to view, manage, and turn off third-party plug-ins.

Includes lots of themes to change the look of the browser.

It has an interchangeable interface to rearrange, add, or remove buttons or areas.

Possible search history matches include the autofill navigation bar, including bookmarked sites and open tabs.

The tabs are at the top of the Navigation Bar. The Firefox Button is also included in menu items grouped in one button for easy access.

Other standard features include tabbed browsing, spell checker, progressive search, dynamic bookmarks, download manager, custom browsing, georeferencing, GPU acceleration, and search engine integration desired by the user.

Web Support

It supports various web standards, including HTML, XML, XHTML, SVG 1.1 (partial), CSS 1, 2, and 3, ECMAScript (JavaScript), DOM, MathML, DTD, XSLT, XPath, and PNG images with alpha transparency.

Firefox also includes standards recommended by WHATWG and canvas items.

In terms of compliance with Acid2 and Acid3 web standards, Firefox successfully passes the Acid2 test starting from version 3.0.

However, 3.x release branches cannot entirely pass the Acid3 test because it is 93/100 in Firefox 3.5 and 94/100 in 3.6. In the evolving (alpha) version of Firefox 3.7, the score reaches 97/100.

Security

When using the HTTPS protocol, the Mozilla web browser implements the SSL/TLS system to protect communication with web servers using strong encryption.

It supports smart cards for authentication purposes and has anti-phishing protection, where it downloads web fake lists 48 times a day.

It also has anti-malware and antivirus integration that automatically analyzes downloads.

It allows us to distinguish the level of analysis that a site will give and customize options for passwords, cookies, image uploads, and plug-in installation.

It offers the option of preserving browsing habits as private information and has a particular browsing option.

View

Some users find that some sites are not displaying correctly in Firefox.

However, this is a relatively rare and non-Firefox-specific issue that occurs when websites do not comply with W3C standards and use specific codes, both using Microsoft’s proprietary technology that does not use W3C standards, ActiveX controls, or VBScript language.

There is also an extension called “IE Tab” that allows you to use the Internet Explorer rendering engine.

This is for troubleshooting image issues on pages that use certain Microsoft technologies but expose the user to the risks of vulnerabilities in Internet Explorer. This extension is only available for Microsoft Windows.

One of the most visible changes compared to development versions in Firefox is its new visual identity.

Free software is often a significant lack of visual identity and symbols and is said to be suffering from a lack of user interface design.

The visual design of the development versions is reasonable but considered lower than many professional software packages.

The release of Version 0.8 in February 2004 brought a new look, including new icons. Jon Hicks designed the icon for Firefox 0.8 and later.

The logo has an animal called a stylized red panda (Ailurus fulgens).

The Firefox icon is a registered trademark used to show the company’s official support.

Therefore, although the software on which Firefox is based is open source, images are not free; thus, software distributors distributing patched or modified versions of Firefox cannot use the icon, but due to the free software philosophy, the company does not initiate legal action, especially with those using the Firefox image in programs that use code.

However, in October 2006, there was a discussion about the browser logo and trademark between the company and the Debian Project.

Its logo violates Debian’s free software guidelines when the free code is not available as source code for the rest of the product.

Debian had just changed a logo that showed a world ball. The company commented that the name Firefox is inseparable from its official logo, so eventually, the Debian Project decided to use the Iceweasel browser, a variant of Firefox.