MOZILLA FIREFOX.
 Introductory.
What is Mozilla firefox? Mozilla firefox, was a project made by Dave Hyatt and Blake Ross as an experimental brance of the Mozilla project whom was introduced on 9th November 2004. As you can see later on, a table showing the history of Mozilla Firefox – which was originally made on 23rd September 2002. But during that time, it was not stable and it’s still under constructing. They released quite a lot of version from 0.1 up to 1.0 then it’s released, which means on 9th November 2004, the version which was released was Mozilla Firefox v1. It’s quite stable so far, but a lot of patches needed to be done. You could see all the fixes & changes made to Mozilla Firefox ever since it was released on 9th November until the year 2008 – Now. So just how Mozilla Firefox was created? Well, let me introduce you a new engine called Gecko layout engine which was developed by Mozilla Corporation. It’s used in most of the applications such as Mozilla Firefox 3, Netscape 9 and Flock, to display webpages. Gecko was made using C++ and is cross-platform, running on operating system such as Mac OS, Windows and Linux. Gecko is also second-most popular layout engine after Trident which was used by Internet Explorer since version 4 and followed by WebKit which was used by Safari & Google Chrome and Presto – by Opera. Mozilla Firefox is also now the second most popular web-browser in the net, after Internet Explorer due to it’s feature, it’s catching up Internet Explorer in terms of popularity & usage. The Features of Firefox include :
Tabbed Browsing.
 Incremental find.
 Live bookmarking.  Download Manager & Virus checking after download.   Additional Third-party add-ons.(AVG TOOLBAR).
My Opinions:
History of Mozilla Firefox.
The browser created by Hyatt and Ross’ was made inorder to challenge the perceived software bloat of Mozilla suit, which integrated features such as IRC, mail and news and WYSIWYG HTML editing into one software suite. Firefox which was created by Hyatt and Ross’ retains the cross-platform nature of the original Mozilla browser using XUL. By using this XUL, it makes it possible to extend the browser’s capabilities by using extensions and themes either made by third-party developer or by Mozilla. This is why the Mozilla Update website is opened, because the website is used to contain all the “approved” themes and extensions as some third-party program may cause instability or risk of security being exposed by the user. So all the third-party program have to go through an approval before it is allowed to be distributed to the user or being downloaded by user. The first firefox were build only with “back”, “forward” and “stop” buttons and a URL field with no cache, no stored history, etc. It was thus, a lot lighter than Mozilla itself. Although the Mozilla foundation intended to make the Mozilla suite obsolete and replace with Firefox, they are unable to do so until 12th April 2006, because there are still a lot of corporate users, as well as being bundled with other software. The Mozilla community then continues to release new version of the suite using SeaMonkey to avoid confusion with the original Mozilla Suite. 5th February 2004, Business and IT consulting company, AMS, categorized Mozilla Firefox which then named to Firebird as a “Tier 1” (meaning “Best of Breed”) open source product which means AMS considered Firebird (called at that time) to be virtually risk-free and technically strong. Firefox was chosen as it’s similar to “Firebird”, but also the uniqueness of the computing industry. To ensure the name will stays as it is, the Mozilla foundation began the process by registering Firefox as a trademark with the United States Patent and Trademark office in December 2003. This process causes a several months of delay in releasing Firefox 0.8 when the foundation found out that UK Firefox had already been registered as a trademark for browsers by The Charlton Company. It was then resolved when Charlton’s European gave a license to the foundation to use the trademark. The icon and GUI design lacks a strong visual identity as they are designed by programmers, and not graphic designers gurus. During the early release of Firefox – Firebird & Phoenix, both considered to have reasonable visual designs but were not up to the standard as many professionally released software packages. So by October 2003,, a professional interface designer, Steven Garrity, wrote and article about everything he considered to be wrong with Mozilla’s visual identity and it grab a great deal of attention. Shortly afterwards, Garrity was invited by the Mozilla Foundation to head up the new visual identity team, which made the release of Firefox 0.8 in February 2004, saw the introduction of the new branding efforts, including new icons designed by Jon hicks. The logo then revised and updated. Until now Mozilla Firefox Icon is as shown below.  Browser Stats.
1 Internet Explorer 6.0 29.91%
2 Internet Explorer 7.0 28.55% 3 Firefox 2.0 21.20% 4 Firefox 3.0 7.41% 5 Firefox 1.5 2.31% 6 Safari 3.0 1.14% 7 Opera 9.2 1.00% 8 Safari 2.0 0.66% 9 Opera 9.5 0.55% 10 Firefox 1.0 0.48%  Growth of Mozilla Firefox in Market Since 2004.
Mozilla Firefox
2008 - 18.43% 2007 - 14.92% 2006 - 10.67% 2005 - 8.08% 2004 - 3.66%
 Usage data from
“www.netapplications.com” TimeLine for Mozilla Firefox.
2003 – 2004
>>2003 – April 13th, the phoenix name changed to Firebird. >>2003 – October, Mozilla Icon  >>2003 – December, Mozilla began process of registering Firefox as trademark 2004 - 2005 >>2004 – February, the release on 0.8 changed the Mozilla Icon/logo  >>2004 - Firebird name changed to Mozilla Firefox on February 9. >>2004 - Firefox 1.0 was released on 9th November. 2005 - 2006 >>2005 - Firefox 1.5 was released on 30th November. >>2005 - Firefox 1.5 & Other new Mozilla products no longer support Mac OS Xv10.1 on 23rd June. 2006 - 2007 >>2006 – Firefox 2 Alpha 1 was released on 22nd March. >>2006 - Firefox 2.0 was released on 24th October. >>2006 – Firefox 2 final version released on 24th October. 2007 - 2008 >>2007 – Firefox 3 beta was released on 19th November. 2008 - 2009 >>2008 - Firefox 3.0 was released on 17th June. >>2008 – Firefox 3.1 alpha 2 was released on 6th September. Reference
http://www.mozilla.org/projects/firefox/roadmap-1.0.html “Roadmap of mozilla Firefox for version 0.1 – 1.0” http://www.mozilla.org/projects/firefox/roadmap-1.5.html “Roadmap of Mozilla Firefox for version 1.0 to 2.0” http://www.mozilla.org/projects/firefox/roadmap.html “Roadmap of Mozilla Firefox for version 2.0 – 3.0 +” https://wiki.mozilla.org/ReleaseRoadmap "Basic knowledge of Mozilla" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Mozilla_Firefox “All the history of Mozilla Firefox which I used to refer to do this journal”
Subpages of Internet Browsers Internet Explorer | Mozilla Firefox | Netscape | Opera | Safari Home | Internet Events | Web Development Programming | Internet Browsers | Search Engines & Directories |
|
|
Internet Browsers >
Mozilla Firefox |
