Mozilla Firefox is a free, cross-platform, graphical 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 numerous media outlets, including
Forbes and the Wall Street Journal. With over 25 million
downloads in the 99 days after its release, Firefox became one of the
most-used free and open source applications, especially among home
users. The 50 millionth download of Firefox occurred on April 29, 2005
(about 6 months after the 1.0 release).
With Firefox, the Mozilla Foundation aims to develop a lightweight,
fast, intuitive, and highly extensible standalone browser based on the
Navigator component of the Mozilla Application Suite. Firefox has
become the foundation's main development focus (along with its
Thunderbird email client), and has replaced the Mozilla Suite as their
official main software release.
Features of Firefox include the integrated pop-up blocker, tabbed
browsing, live bookmarks, support for open standards, and an extension
mechanism for adding functionality. Although other browsers have
offered these features for some time, Firefox became the first browser
with such features to achieve large-scale adoption.
Firefox has attracted attention as an alternative to other browsers
such as Microsoft Internet Explorer. As of April 2005, estimates of
Firefox's usage share range between 8 and 10% of overall browser usage
(see market adoption section). Many supporters believe that Firefox
will significantly reduce Internet Explorer's dominant usage share, and
perhaps even re-ignite the browser wars.
|
