Mozilla Firefox
in full Mozilla Firefox
free open-source Web browser created by American software
company Mozilla Corporation.
In 1998 American Internet services company Netscape
Communications Corp. decided to designate its Navigator browser as open-source
for users, who began the development of Mozilla Firefox. The
Mozilla team, led by American developers Dave Hyatt and Blake Ross,
sought to create a light, fast-loading browser that would appeal to
users in its efficiency. In 2002 they released their first browser, Phoenix,
which soon included features such as bookmarking (for saving Web site
addresses) and the ability to add extensions to modify or customize the
browser.
Because of trademark disputes with American software company
Phoenix Technologies, Phoenix became Firebird. Then in 2004 Firebird was
renamed Firefox to avoid confusion with an open-source development project of the
same name. The first Firefox (version 0.8) included an installer for Microsoft
Corporation's Windows OS (operating system) and had Google as its sole default
search engine (users had to add others manually). Soon after the release of
Firefox 1.0 in November 2004 the browser began to take a significant portion of
the market share from Microsoft's Internet Explorer. Mozilla later expanded
Firefox's market worldwide by adding support for 31 languages. Within weeks of
the release of Firefox 1.0, Mozilla also introduced Thunderbird, an open-source
e-mail client that was developed to work in tandem with Firefox.
Frequent upgrades to Firefox's security features
provide protection against viruses and other malicious software. In October
2006 Firefox 2.0 added protection from phishing (e-mail messages that seek to
exploit the recipient) and the ability to restore tabs (hidden browser windows)
from a user's last session. In June 2008 Firefox 3.0 included a new Web
page-rendering engine to improve performance. In June 2009 Firefox 3.5 included
a new, faster JavaScript engine and support for HTML 5.0 (hypertext markup
language used for formatting Web pages). Cumulative downloads for the Firefox
browser exceeded one billion on July 31, 2009, making it easily the most widely
used open-source software in the world.
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