Quiz Of The Week: The Fiery Fox

Firefox, published by Mozilla Foundation, is one of the most successful open source projects ever created. It has a huge and very enthusiastic following worldwide, and thousands of developers working round the clock to make it better.

Firefox is available  in 79 languages on almost all major operating systems, and is ready for the upcoming Windows 8. Since 2009, it has been slowly losing market share to Google’s Chrome, but still remains a household name.

“Cookies are delicious delicacies” 

First created by Dave Hyatt, Joe Hewitt and Blake Ross, Firefox is a simple browser, with features including everything you need to comfortably navigate the web: tabbed browsing, spell checker, smart bookmarks and a download manager. However, the core application can be endlessly customized through extensions created by third-party developers.

The Mozilla Foundation offers a “bug bounty” (a cash reward and a Mozilla T-shirt) to researchers who discover severe security holes in Firefox, which has resulted in the browser being widely known as one of the safest. In addition, because of a huge community of developers, Firefox bugs are patched much more quickly than those of its competitors.

In July 2010, all IBM employees (about 400,000) were politely asked to use Firefox as their default browser.

Very soon, we are going to see a lot more of the fiery fox. Mozilla Foundation is currently busy putting together the  HTML5-based Firefox mobile operating system, earlier known as “Boot To Gecko”. The foundation claims it will run lighter and cheaper than Android, disrupting the fragile balance of the smartphone market.

Phone manufacturers TCL and ZTE have already announced plans to make Firefox OS phones. Telefonica has promised to deliver “Firephones” in Brazil through its Vivio network, and even brought a prototype to London last month. We have the latest pictures here.

According to the poll on our site, the majority of TechWeekEurope readers seem ready to give Firefox OS a chance.

So how much do you know about the Firefox browser?

Take our quiz!

And if you like it, consider trying some of the others. Like the one about browsers in general.