About Firefox

Firefox was created out of the frustration of the dominance of Internet Explorer with it's lack of support for standards and the bloat of the Netscape and Mozilla suites.

Firefox is a standalone web browser which conforms to web standards laid out by the World Wide Web Consortium. Firefox is packed with many features which make browsing the internet safe, secure and an enjoyable experience.

One of the first things noted about Firefox was the inclusion of tabbed browsing which allows you to have many websites open in the same window. To help with security features like popup blocking and cookie management were added.

For Web Developers

Firefox includes developer centric features in Firefox which make website development a lot easier. For instance a javascript console so you can check for error messages in your javascript code. This console will also warn of errors in your CSS. These errors and warnings will even tell you the line number the problem occurs on. The view source option shows your HTML source complete with line numbers and coloured code.

Extendable

Firefox also allows you to add many extensions to the browser so you can customise it to the way you want. For example there is a weather plugin which you can customise to your location so you can check at a glance from the browsers task bar.

Firefox History

Before Internet Explorer came along from Microsoft, Netscape dominated the web world with it's Netscape Navigator. As time went on Microsoft's Internet Explorer started eroding Netscape's share of the browser market mainly due to a larger Windows user base. After all this hammering Netscape eventually released the source code to Netscape Navigator in 1998 the Mozilla Foundation was created. Several versions of the Mozilla application suite were released but in the meantime a new standalone browser was being developed with the intention of being slim and full of features. Originally this new browser was to be called Phoenix but due to some legal issues was renamed to Firebird. Again this ran into trouble with another project called Firebird Database and eventually Firefox was born.