What is Mozilla Firefox?

Mozilla Firefox version 1.0 was released on November 9, 2004 to much media acclaim. Within the first twelve days, the software had over 5 million downloads, making it one of the most-used open-source applications in the world. This free web browser was developed by the Mozilla Foundation and hundreds of volunteers with the aim of providing a small, simple web-browser featuring easily downloadable extensions to allow addition of new features. The number and variety of extensions is rapidly making Firefox the browser of choice among professional web designers and developers. Due to recent criticisms of Microsoft Internet Explorer's vulnerability, Firefox is also attracting attention because it lacks the ActiveX component that is key to Internet Explorer's poor security.

The Naming of Firefox

The Firefox project started life as an experimental branch of the Mozilla Suite, and was first released for public testing on September 1, 2002 named Phoenix. Project leaders Dave Hyatt and Blake Ross wanted to offer a browser that was free from "feature creep", or the idea that the more features the browser has, the better it is. Ridding the browser of excess features helps to combat software "bloat" and also allows users to customize the browser to suit their individual needs. Because of trademark issues, the project name was changed to "Firebird" in April 2003, but this name, too, was unsuccessful, and on February 9, 2004 the browser adopted the name Mozilla Firefox. Ben Goodger is the current lead developer.

Criticism of Firefox

Some people who have switched to Firefox have criticized the browser for not having common features that they were used to in their previous browser. Moreoevr, another common critcism seems to be the lack of an affirmative response by developers to frequent requests that certain minor features to be added. Some of these issues have been solved by extensions, but installing an extension often negatively affects performance in ways that some people argue are not worth the benefit of the feature.

However, some feature-additions have successfully addressed complaints; for example, some users were finding they regularly had to open Internet Explorer for websites that did not work well in Firefox. This caused some Firefox users to default back to using Internet Explorer, instead. However, subsequently Firefox developers released an extension that adds a button to the right-click context menu, allowing users to view a page, or any link on a page, in Internet Explorer.