The title sounds like a remake of the old Clint Eastwood action flicks from the early 1980′s, but it is not. In the early days of interneting you had a browser called Netscape Navigator. Its mascot was Mozilla, who resembled a combination of Tyrannosaurus Rex and Godzilla. Netscape was a good browser, but it lost out to Internet Explorer in marketing. The Netscape name and company went away, but not the philosophy and its innovative software. Instead it transformed into the Mozilla Project around 1998 and into Mozilla Corporation somewhere around 2005.
Netscape released its source code to the open source community, and became Mozilla Project which uses the community based approach to create software. The manifesto is a list of ten directives to institute their philosophy that the Internet should be open to all, encourage innovation in technology, and provide opportunities. They also believe in a balance between open source and commercial enterprises on the Internet.
Firefox is the free open source web browser Mozilla created. It is the second most used web browser with about a 30% share of the market. For the average user performance is as good as Internet Explorer. Its s 3.6 version has some nice features such as updating outdated plug-ins. Plug-ins are the little software programs from third party companies that are downloaded to your computer when you visit a web site. Normally you have to periodically check back at a site if they have had a new release. Firefox notifies the user when plug-ins have become out of date. Firefox now supports web open font format. The web browser is up to 6,000 add-ons to give the user the ability to customize their personal PC.
Firefox 4.0 is in beta mode and will feature Sync for your phone. The goal is to have a seamless transition between your personal desktop browsing and your phone browsing.
Firefox is free award-winning software with you in mind, not a shareholder’s profit margins.