The Mozilla Foundation announced today the official release of Firefox 1.0, its much-hyped
open source alternative to Microsoft’s ubiquitous Internet Explorer (IE) Web browser.
The Mozilla Firefox 1.0 release does not contain any significant feature
enhancements beyond the previous versions, which, according to the Mozilla Foundation, was downloaded
more than 8 million times.
The 1.0 release is a milestone that means the browser is
“feature complete.” The core highlights of FireFox remain the same, including
its integrated pop-up blocker, tabbed browsing features, RSS support (called
Live Bookmarks), integrated search toolbar and an extensible module system
for adding functionality to the browser.
The browser also promises more security than Microsoft’s Internet Explorer (IE), a
claim that helped it gain support (CERT) following a string of vulnerabilities
exposed in Redmond’s browser. But Firefox has
not been without its security concern.
In October, research firm security released an advisory about a tabbed browsing vulnerability
and one security researcher actually
went so far
as to say (and prove) that IE’s code was more stable than alternatives
like Firefox.
However, the application as a whole has been
made more stable with numerous bug fixes and incremental performance
improvements.
The Mozilla open source browser, from which Firefox is spun, was open
sourced by Netscape in 1998. The project
spun off
from AOL’s Netscape division in July 2003 to form the Mozilla
Foundation.
It has been a long and somewhat winding road for Mozilla’s next-generation
Web browser, which has had three names in its short life.
It started as Phoenix, and
then became FireBird. In February it became Firefox.
But for all of the hype and media attention bestowed upon Firefox in recent
months as a potential challenger to the ubiquity of Microsoft’s Internet
Explorer, its overall market penetration remains relatively small.
The latest numbers from Web analytics firm Websidestory put Firefox penetration
at 3 percent. Put together with its Mozilla Suite and Netscape cousins,
Mozilla Web browsers accounted for 6 percent of browsers used according to
Websidestory.
Mozilla Firefox 1.0 is available for Linux,
Windows, and Macintosh as a free download and is licensed under the open source
Mozilla Public License.
