Firefox - Free full featured web browser

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.

Firefox Articles

The next beta test of the new Firefox 3.5 has been released

Mozilla have released the latest Beta test of the up and coming Firefox 3.5 release.

There are some really interesting new things for the latest Firefox. Apart from having HTML 5 support, which means embedded sound and videos are possible without plugins, there is also the new font support from the latest CSS specification. What this means is that designers will have the ability to make sure the user will see the font the designer intended.

Also included is what Mozilla have called TraceMonkey. Tracemonkey is Mozilla's new Javascript engine which has been designed to make it quicker to run Javascript in web applications. In turn this means web applications such as Google Docs online office system should run quicker.

For full details see the full Firefox 3.5 Beta 4 change log.

Mozilla have announced the release of the 3rd beta version of Firefox 3.1

Mozilla have announced the release of the latest Beta 3 of Firefox version 3.1. This is a public preview intended for developers and testers to help find bugs.

The Firefox 3.1 Beta introduces some cool new changes and performance improvments. Javascript has been improved by using the new TraceMonkey javascript engine. New CSS and HTML functionality have been added. Of particular note are the new

A beta version of Firefox 3 has been released for testing.

The Mozilla team have released the first beta of Firefox 3.

Although not complete this version has had a lot of optimisation to make it quicker and easier to use. The rendering engine has been changed to the Cairo engine which is powering many open sourced projects.

Two features added on the location bar are a website identity tool so you can find out about the website you are visiting and a one click bookmark feature by clicking a little star with optional tool to fill in the location and organise the page bookmarked.

Other changes are better security management and notification, native web forms which conform to the operating system being used and Vista support.

Visit the Firefox 3 beta 1 page

Mozilla team have released the Beta 1 milestone release of Firefox 2.0

The Mozilla Foundation have released their beta 1 test of Firefox 2.0 . This brings in some new features and and overhaul to the underlying code.

Some new features include crash recovery, individual close icons for tabs, phishing protection, improved SVG support and support for Javascript 1.7.

This is a test for developer and early adopters so there may be problems. See the announcement here.

Firefox Information

Company/Developer:
Mozilla Foundation
Website:
Firefox website
Category:
Web Browsers
Platforms: