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.
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.
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?
And if you like it, consider trying some of the others. Like the one about browsers in general.
Targetting AWS, Microsoft? British competition regulator soon to announce “behavioural” remedies for cloud sector
Move to Elon Musk rival. Former senior executive at X joins Sam Altman's venture formerly…
Bitcoin price rises towards $100,000, amid investor optimism of friendlier US regulatory landscape under Donald…
Judge Kaplan praises former FTX CTO Gary Wang for his co-operation against Sam Bankman-Fried during…
Explore the future of work with the Silicon In Focus Podcast. Discover how AI is…
Executive hits out at the DoJ's “staggering proposal” to force Google to sell off its…