Mozilla Firefox celebrates its first anniversary

You may have to download it from the Mozilla website, but that has not stopped Firefox from rapidly gaining market share. The browser celebrates its first anniversary this month.

BY TOMS MATHEW

19th November, 2005: Microsoft has always been dominating the browser market with its Internet Explorer. The only real contender ever was Netscape Navigator - but in internet terms, that was a century back. But, as we know Netscape encountered some serious counterattack from Microsoft, and a mountain of marketing mistakes from its own management. The inevitable happened, Netscape is no more in the race.

No one ever thought there was space for a pretender in the browser battle. So Microsoft continued to stay at the top. Then, on November 2004 came Mozilla Firefox with its simple yet powerful browser. 

A tfirst, Microsoft didn't even consider Firefox as its rival. But by the time Microsoft smelled something happening, Firefox was racing away. An easy to use interface, some much desired features like tabbed browsing, and less vulnerability to security threats easily helped Firefox gain a foothold, and the anti-Microsoft crowd did the rest of the work in promoting the browser.

Firefox is celebrating its first birthday this month with a huge fan following and a whooping 100 million downloads. The market share of Firfox has touched 11.5%. At last, a worthy contender has arrived. 

With 85% net users still relying on Internet Explorer, Microsoft is of course the king of browsers. But that is so because it comes pre loaded with the copy of Windows you have. But Firefix could only be downloaded, and even then, word of mouth publicity helped spread it like wildfire. Those who used it told the others and those who used it, never looked back to another browser. 

Microsoft is not sitting comfortably, though. Microsoft has announced that it would include features like tabbed browsing, RSS feeds and pop-up blocking which made Firefox the favourite of surfers worldwide in its next version. One can clearly understand the fear doing the Microsoft rounds. 

The Firefox is the product of Mozilla Foundation, a non-profit organization that provides leadership to the open-source Mozilla project. Its subsidiary, the Mozilla Corporation employs the developers and co-ordinates the releases of the Firefox browser. 

Firefox came heavily loaded with tons of features which helped it cross the 100 million mark.

Some of the useful which Firefox provides are:

Tabbed Browsing

It means that you can surf multiple pages within the same window. So, no need to open different windows for different pages, thereby eliminating the cluster of windows at the bottom of the toolbar. The first browser which offered this feature was Opera.

Pop-up blocker

From experience, we know that the most irritating thing when we surf the Net is the sudden appearance of pop-ups. Older versions of Windows never had pop-up blocking ability. Now they are available with Windows XP Service Pack 2. Firefox pop-up blockers are so effective that you wont have to worry about pop-ups anymore.

Integrated Search

A small box is integrated wih the browser so that if you want to search something, you just have to type the keyword in the box. The default search engine is Google, but can be set to Amazon or Yahoo.

Built-in RSS feeder

An RSS feeder is built into the browser for those who subscribe to feeds regularly. Though not having much features, it is ok.

Addition of extensions and themes

We can add about 117 extensions and themes from the Mozilla website. This helps to change the look and feel of the browser. It also increases a lot of functionality.

Download manager

The browser comes with a download manager, which keeps a log of all the recent downloads. 

Fewer spyware attacks

Since most of the spyware programs are written for Internet Explorer, Firefox users can sleep peacefully. Most of the spyware attacks aimed at Firefox have been fixed by Mozilla.

Small setup file

The filesize of Firefox is almost 4.7 MB which is much less when compared with other browsers. Just think about the enormous filesize of Navigator, if you have ever tried to download one.

Mozilla has plans to integrate some more utilities to its prestigious browser. By the time they have done their job, Firefox is sure to capture a much noticeable share in the browser battle.

BY TOMS MATHEW