Mozilla Firefox is a free and open source web browser descended from the Mozilla Application Suite, managed by the Mozilla Corporation. Firefox had 19.97% of the recorded usage share of web browsers as of October 2008, making it the second-most popular browser in current use worldwide, after Internet Explorer.

To display web pages, Firefox uses the Gecko layout engine, which implements some current web standards plus a few features which are intended to anticipate likely additions to the standards.

Firefox includes tabbed browsing, a spell checker, incremental find, live bookmarking, a download manager, and an integrated search system that uses the user’s desired search engine. Functions can be added through add-ons created by third-party developers, the most popular of which include the NoScript JavaScript disabling utility, Tab Mix Plus customizer, FoxyTunes media player control toolbar, Adblock Plus ad blocking utility, StumbleUpon (website discovery), Foxmarks Bookmark Synchronizer (bookmark synchronizer), DownThemAll! download enhancer, and Web Developer toolbar.

Firefox runs on various versions of Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, and many other Unix-like operating systems. Its current stable release is version 3.0.4, released on November 12, 2008. Firefox’s source code is free software, released under a tri-license GPL/LGPL/MPL.

Features

Features included with Firefox are tabbed browsing, spell checker, incremental find, live bookmarking, an integrated download manager, keyboard shortcuts, and an integrated search system that uses the user’s desired search engine.

The developers of Firefox aimed to produce a browser that “just surfs the web” and delivers the “best possible browsing experience to the widest possible set of people.”

Users can customize Firefox with extensions and themes. Mozilla maintains an add-on repository at addons.mozilla.org with nearly 6000 add-ons in it as of September 2008.

Firefox provides an environment for web developers in which they can use built-in tools, such as the Error Console or the DOM Inspector, or extensions, such as Firebug.

Standards

Mozilla Firefox implements many web standards, including HTML, XML, XHTML, SVG 1.1 (partial),CSS (with extensions), ECMAScript (JavaScript), DOM, MathML, DTD, XSLT, XPath, and (animated) PNG images with alpha transparency. Firefox also implements standards proposals created by the WHATWG such as client-side storage, and canvas element.

Firefox passes the Acid2 standards-compliance test from version 3.0. Like all other stable browsers as of August 2008, Firefox 3.0 does not pass the Acid3 test; it scores 71/100 and does not render the image correctly.

Security

Firefox uses a sandbox security model, and limits scripts from accessing data from other web sites based on the same origin policy. It uses SSL/TLS to protect communications with web servers using strong cryptography when using the https protocol. It also provides support for web applications to use smartcards for authentication purposes.

The Mozilla Foundation offers a “bug bounty” to researchers who discover severe security holes in Firefox. Official guidelines for handling security vulnerabilities discourage early disclosure of vulnerabilities so as not to give potential attackers an advantage in creating exploits.

Because Firefox has fewer and less severe publicly known unpatched security vulnerabilities than Internet Explorer (see Comparison of web browsers), improved security is often cited as a reason to switch from Internet Explorer to Firefox. The Washington Post reports that exploit code for critical unpatched security vulnerabilities in Internet Explorer was available for 284 days in 2006. In comparison, exploit code for critical security vulnerabilities in Firefox was available for 9 days before Mozilla shipped a patch to remedy the problem.

A 2006 Symantec study showed that although Firefox had surpassed other browsers in the number of vendor-confirmed vulnerabilities that year through September, these vulnerabilities were patched far more quickly than those found in other browsers. Symantec later clarified their statement, saying that Firefox still had fewer security vulnerabilities than Internet Explorer, as counted by security researchers. As of Nov 15, 2008, Firefox 3 has one security vulnerability unpatched according to Secunia. Internet Explorer 7 has nine security vulnerabilities unpatched, the most severe of which was rated “moderately critical” by Secunia.

Licensing

Firefox is free and open source software, and is tri-licensed under the Mozilla Public License (MPL), GNU General Public License (GPL), and the GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL). These licenses permit anyone to view, modify and/or redistribute the source code, and several publicly released applications have been built on it; for example, Netscape, Flock, Miro, and Songbird make use of code from Firefox.

The official end-user builds of Firefox distributed from mozilla.com are licensed under the Mozilla End User License Agreement (EULA). Several elements do not fall under the scope of the tri-license and have their use restricted by the EULA, including the trademarked Firefox name, the proprietary artwork, and the proprietary closed-source Talkback crash reporter in Firefox version prior to 3. Because of this and the clickwrap agreement included in the Windows version, the Free Software Foundation (FSF) consider these builds proprietary software. However, BreakPad, an open source crash reporting system, has replaced Talkback in Firefox 3.0.

In the past, Firefox was licensed solely under the MPL, which the FSF criticizes for being weak copyleft; the license permits, in limited ways, proprietary derivative works. Additionally, code under the MPL cannot legally be linked with code under the GPL or the LGPL. To address these concerns, Mozilla re-licensed Firefox under the tri-license scheme of MPL, GPL, and LGPL. Since the re-licensing, developers have been free to choose the license under which they will receive the code, to suit their intended use: GPL or LGPL linking and derivative works when one of those licenses is chosen, or MPL use (including the possibility of proprietary derivative works) if they choose the MPL.

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