Mozilla Firefox

From My Experience

How I Found Mozilla Firefox

A couple of years ago, my father stumbled upon Mozilla and its various programs. He downloaded them and found that Firefox was much faster and safer than Internet Explorer. Conscious of the family’s online safety copied the Setup.exe file of each program to a USB flash drive and proceeded to install them on every computer we owned. When I asked him what he was doing, he told me to stop using IE and start using Firefox because it was safer. Ever curious and willing to try new things, I soon got to love Firefox’s user-friendly layout and customization.

Incompatible Sites

Ever since then I only use IE for sites that won’t work on Firefox. The first site I found that didn’t work with Firefox was the mmorpg called Flyff (Fly for fun). This annoyed me at first since it was the site I went to the most, but instead of switching back to exclusively using IE again, I decided to not go to the site as much. Actually, I forgot about its existence for a while since I couldn’t get to it using Firefox. I also noticed that some of the windows sites (Such as Windows Updates) will not work with Mozilla.

CPU Overload

When I acquired my laptop after graduation I was thrilled! It came with the Vista Home Premium Edition operating system, which I’ve grown attached to despite its various compatibility issues. Months went by and I began to realize that Firefox wasn’t working properly on my laptop. It would freeze up on me sometimes and slow down the rest of the laptop so bad that I was forced to restart it manually. After a while of this I found out that Firefox was using an immense amount of CPU and memory power to run. Appalled, I was forced to switch to IE whenever I multitasked too much. However, Firefox 3 gave me a ray of hope that I’ll get into more detail later.

Password Manager

This integrated part of Firefox has been a real lifesaver to me. Unlike IE that stores your passwords and doesn’t let you access them, Firefox has a window that lets you see what username and password you use in what website. Firefox also has the added security of the “Master Password” which allows you to set a password that locks all of your other passwords out of prying eyes. I’d advise not setting this to something someone would think of using, but would be easy for you to remember because you’d be using every time you open your browser.

Themes

When I first acquired Firefox I found the idea of customizable themes interesting and soon became to attached to a theme called BlueShift. When I upgraded to Firefox 2 BlueShift was not available and only the original color, Redshift V2, is available to download. Not satisfied with the red color, I went searching again and found a theme called NavyBlue. Now this theme had a nice nautical theme to it and I was currently (and possibly still am) into pirates. I stuck with it for a few months till I saw the darker NASA theme. The customizable blank page and other images piqued my interest and I’ve used it ever since.

The History of Firefox

Beginnings

The fledgling rising out of the ashes of the Netscape browser, Mozilla had some disagreements with it’s parent organization and wanted an independent identity while Netscape knew that it knew how to do send out the product better than Mozilla did, having experience. The theme was awkward and Netscape was overbearing, causing many headaches within Mozilla supporting Netscape staff.

“Many contributors, myself included, pushed for further improvements to the user interface. We got extensive pushback from people within the company. On more than one occasion I tried to flex my muscle as “user interface module owner” (Mozilla parlance, then a something of a novelty — Mozilla had granted me this role in an attempt to show autonomy in project development after the disaster that was the original Modern theme). It did not go well. Weak management stressed the importance of seniority over logic when it came to feature design. I was told I could not expect to use Open Source tricks against folk who were employed by the Company (all hail!). I held true to my beliefs and refused to review low quality patches. I was almost fired. Others weren't so lucky. It became a source of great frustration and disillusionment for me. I lost motivation. I realized Netscape's Byzantine stranglehold permeated the design of the Mozilla product still, and that now as a Netscape employee I was expected to use my “module ownership” to support its whims. I was to be a puppet.” –Ben Goodger

The cofounders of Mozilla decided to start anew attempting a project called Manticore that flopped. Next they attempted a browser called Camino which still exists today in Mac systems. Finally they got the idea for Firefox, which was still a far cry from the Firefox we know today. (Goodger, 2006)

Phoenix

0.1 “Pescadero” Released September 23, 2002, Phoenix 0.1 marked the true beginnings of Firefox. The original idea of Phoenix was to make the Mozilla browser faster and leaner. The menus were customizable at this point, but there wasn’t much content to add to the toolbar. The only addable buttons were home, print, go, and an icon to go to the Mozilla website. However, this early version did have a download manager and tabs which IE hasn’t added until this past year. (Gsurface, 2005)

0.2 “Santa Cruz” Phoenix 0.2 was released on October 1, 2002. A sidebar was added as well as new options to the preferences section and the ability to add extensions and themes to the browser. Slightly faster than Phoenix 0.1, it offered more options to arrange on the toolbar such as history, downloads, new window, search bar, and bookmarks. The search bar was only for Google, dmoz.org, and the page you were currently on. (Gsurface, 2005)

0.3 “Lucia” was released October 13, 2002. Shrinking in file size by 1MB, Phoenix 0.3 made many changes to the overall look of the browser. Previously the refresh and stop buttons were on the right side of the address bar (Like in the current IE browser), but this version moved those buttons to the left side, next to the next, back, and home buttons. The Mozilla team also added an image and popup blocker although it didn’t let you add in custom URLs. (Gsurface, 2005)

0.4 “Oceano” was released October 19, 2002. In this version the option to manually add URLs into the popup blocker was added and the “white list” was updated. Tabbed browsing was improved by the use of hotkeys (such as Ctrl + t for new tabs) and the address bar was tweaked so that all you had to do is press Ctrl + Enter to add the website suffix automatically while typing. (Gsurface, 2005)

0.5 “Naples” was released December 7, 2002. This version was more about fixing bugs than improving the User Interface. A new Intellimouse support allowed the user use the back and forward buttons on his or her mouse to go to the next or previous site and the browser could now remember the previous settings that were used before it was exited. (Gsurface, 2005)

Firebird

Faced with copyright issues with Phoenix Technologies, Mozilla decided to change their browser’s name to Firebird. Firebird 0.6, codenamed “Glendale” was released May 17 2003. They kept the original layout, but of course changed some things in the User Interface. The button images were changed along with the default theme. The file size increased by 5MB because of all the new changes and it’s compatibility with the Mac OS X. In Firebird 0.6.1, relealsed July 28, 2003, the browser had its own executable icon separate from the Mozilla icon. The Mozilla team also fixed a number of bugs, adding cut, copy, and paste icons on the toolbar. The password manager was added in Firefox 0.7 (I’d probably have forgotten a lot of my passwords without this) and the file size was reduced by 2MB. (Gsurface, 2005)

Firefox

In February of 2004 Mozilla decided to change the name of their browser yet again. The previous title of Firebird was taken by a different corporation, but Mozilla had already bought the rights to it and could have kept it. However, they realized that the name Firebird would clash with the name of their email program, Thunderbird, and so changed it to Firefox. (Davis, 2004)

Firefox 0.8 “Royal Oak” let users surf the web offline and gave PC users the option of installing the developer tools with it or not. It also utilized the “new” Firefox icon we’ve come to know and possibly love. They also changed the default engine to Google, but gave users the ability to change search engines if they wanted to. Version 0.9 added compatibility with Linux and a new default theme. Users moving from IE to Firefox now had the option to move their user data over to Firefox. In version 0.9.1 the default theme was revamped into what it is now. (Gsurface, 2005)

The long awaited Firefox 1.0 came in 31 different languages and in the PR version the Master Password was integrated into the Password Manager. (Gsurface, 2005) When I joined the proud few who use Firefox it was in this stage. I hope that this inspires you to use this amazing browser as well, but you are free to your choices as always.

What’s New

Firefox 2 “Bon Ocho”

Many out there still do not know about the superior performance and speed of Mozilla Firefox and the safety it provides. Some have been deceived by the current “statistics” into thinking that IE is safer than Firefox when in fact IE doesn’t release most of vulnerabilities that have been found (Claburn, 2008).

Firefox 3 “Gran Paradisio”

Firefox 3 Beta 1 was released Monday, November 19, 2007 with great expectations. However, this version is not to be used by casual users as errors within the browser make it unstable. A blacklist, like the white list of the popup blocker created back in Phoenix, has been iterated into Firefox 3 to protect users from malware. (Claburn 2007)

“Responding to a report last week that 80% of the bugs found in Firefox 3 would remain unrepaired by the time the software is officially released, Dotzler said in a blog post, ‘That claim is simply [not true]. We've already fixed over 11,000 bugs and features in Firefox 3 and now we're discussing how to handle the remaining 700 issues we wanted to get fixed for Firefox 3.’” -Thomas Claburn

During the testing time many errors and bugs were fixed, one being a CPU spike that caused the usage of hundreds of megabytes of RAM. Since this fix was in the server itself a new version did not need to be downloaded. (Wagner, 2007) As you may have noticed earlier this is one of the big things I’m counting on Firefox 3 to fix. It is also the reason why I download the Betas despite the warning not to.

Just newly released on Tuesday, February 12, 2008, Firefox 3 Beta 3 fixed 1,300 errors found in Firefox 3 Beta 2. (Claburn, 2008)

Bibliography

Claburn, Thomas (February 13, 2008). Mozilla Releases Firefox 3 Beta 3. InformationWeek. Retrieved February 20, 2008 from http://www.informationweek.com

Claburn, Thomas (February 8, 2008). Mozilla Issues Firefox 2.0.0.12 Security Update. InformationWeek. Retrieved February 22 from http://www.informationweek.com

Claburn, Thomas (November 20, 2007) Mozilla Releases Firefox 3 Beta 1. InformationWeek. Retrieved February 26, 2008 from http://www.informationweek.com

Davis, Ziff (February 9, 2004). Mozilla Renames Browser, Revs New Releases. eWeek. Retrieved February 22, 2008 from General OneFile database.

Goodger, Ben (February 6, 2006). The Inside Track on Firefox Development. Mozillazine. Retrieved February 26, 2008 from http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/ben

Gsurface (March 30, 2005). The History of Mozilla Firefox: From Phoenix, to Firebird, to Firefox. Retrieved February 26, 2008 from http://www.flexbeta.net

Saltzman, Matthew (December 2004). Browser Wars: Mozilla vs. MegaCorp. OR/MS Today, 31(6). Retrieved February 19, 2008 from General OneFile database

Wagner, Mitch (November 26, 2007). Mozilla Fixes Memory and CPU Problems in Firefox 3 Beta 1. InformationWeek. Retrieved February 26, 2008 from http://www.informationweek.com