Firefox- Undisputed Winner Of Browser War
The ignition of project Mozilla dates back to mid 1990's. It all started when Netscape lost the battle with Microsoft over bundling of Internet Explorer browser into Windows. This event marked the end of dominance of Netscape Navigator and it soon started to lose its market share to IE. Netscape released its version 4 in the year 1997 but it was nothing as compared to IE4. It was high time for Netscape to bring something special which could outperform the Microsoft Internet Explorer if they even wish to turn tables around. So, Netscape announced the Mozilla Project in 1998 in which Netscape's source code was thrown open for developer use. And within six years, a web browser was developed which was not only fast, lightweight but also performed every function better than IE. Yes, this browser is none other than Firefox, previously known as Firebird.
Mozilla Firefox, presently the safest browser available, is backed up by huge community of active volunteer coders who have been with them since the time of Netscape halcyon days. The absence of Active X components, which are widely used to install spy wares as in the case of IE users, makes Firefox a safe browsing experience. Also, what clearly demarcates the IE and Firefox is the frequency of updates that the later receives. If vulnerability is found it is corrected and updated within few days or even within few hours whereas IE receives no updates for years!
It's interesting to note that disk space requirements of Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox. Internet Explorer will require a hefty 80 megabytes, while Mozilla Firefox only takes only 4.9 megabytes in disk space to operate- quite a healthy difference!
Firefox derives its powerful rendering engine "Gecko" from its parent Mozilla products. Its rendering is precise and speedy though it fails Acid 2 test (a standard compliance test for webpage rendering) but still scores well above than IE, which lags at the bottom when rendering is considered.
Internet Explorer is commonly close to many types of invention and creativity that Mozilla Firefox lets its users enjoy. Internet explorers can't enjoy open source plugins, themes, or other add-ons that Mozilla Firefox can. In many respects, such add-ons are what can make one browser more useful than another- as we all have specific needs in a browser that only open source developers can address on such a large basis.
Tabbed browsing is a sensation that can triple productivity many times over, simply due to the fact that there is better organization and record keeping to be done with tabbed browsing. Internet Explorer versions have accomplished offering the same thing, but it is less efficient on memory usage and will appear to be much more slow than that of Firefox.
One of the best known features of Firefox 2 is the fact that it offers the session restore ability. Far too often, browsers can crash for reasons beyond the developers. When and if this happens, users will lose everything they were doing. But with session restore, a user can restart a session that saved all URL data being browsed, as well as other helpful information that can make a browser crash much less irritating and counter productive to one's goals.
The future development of Firefox versions has already been started and version 3 which is likely to pass Acid 2 test is expected to release in June 2008. With this release Firefox is set to show doors to IE legacy.