Mozilla Firefox

Mozilla Firefox is a free web browser descended from the Mozilla Application Suite and managed by Mozilla Corporation. Firefox had 22.48% of the recorded usage share of web browsers as of April 2009, making it the second most popular browser in terms of current use worldwide, after Internet Explorer.

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

Firefox features include 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 (Google by default in most localizations). Functions can be added through add-ons, created by third-party developers, of which there is a wide selection, a fact that has attracted many of Firefox's users.

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.

Users can customize Firefox with browser "add-ons". Mozilla maintains a repository of these developed extensions and themes at addons.mozilla.org with nearly 6,500 available as of December 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.

Firefox can also be installed in an USB drive and run directly from it.

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 April 23, 2009, Firefox 3 has no security vulnerabilities unpatched according to Secunia.Internet Explorer 7 has nine security vulnerabilities unpatched, the most severe of which was rated "moderately critical" by Secunia.

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