Free Penguin download - firefox
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rpm for OpenSuse Mozilla Firefox is a web browser, FTP client and gopher client descended from the Mozilla Application Suite, managed by the Mozilla Corporation.Firefox had 16.98% of the recorded usage share of Web browsers as of January 2008. Firefox uses the open-source Gecko layout engine, which implements some current Web standards plus a few features which are intended to anticipate likely additions to the standards. Firefox includes tabbed browsing, a spell checker, incremental find, live bookmarking, a download manager, and a search system that uses Google. Functions can be added through more than 2,000 add-ons created by third party developers;
the most popular include FoxyTunes (controls music players), Adblock Plus (ad blocker), StumbleUpon (website discovery), DownThemAll! (download functions) and Web Developer (web tools). Firefox runs on various versions of Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X, GNU/Linux, and many other Unix-like operating systems.
Its current stable release is version 2.0.0.12, released on February 7, 2008.
Firefox's source code is free software, released under a tri-license GPL/LGPL/MPL. Firefox is the second-most popular browser in current use worldwide after Internet Explorer when combining version market share.
It is third after Internet Explorer 7 and Internet Explorer 6, but surpassed Internet Explorer 5 in early 2005 with Firefox 1.0. Dave Hyatt and Blake Ross began working on the Firefox project as an experimental branch of the Mozilla project. They believed the commercial requirements of Netscape's sponsorship and developer-driven feature creep compromised the utility of the Mozilla browser.
To combat what they saw as the Mozilla Suite's software bloat, they created a stand-alone browser, with which they intended to replace the Mozilla Suite.
On April 3, 2003, the Mozilla Organization announced that they planned to change their focus from the Mozilla Suite to Firefox and Thunderbird. The Firefox project has undergone several name changes.
Originally titled Phoenix, it was renamed because of trademark issues with Phoenix Technologies. The replacement name, Firebird, provoked an intense response from the Firebird free database software project.
In response, the Mozilla Foundation stated that the browser should always bear the name Mozilla Firebird to avoid confusion with the database software.
Continuing pressure from the database server's development community forced another change; on February 9, 2004, Mozilla Firebird became Mozilla Firefox,[ often referred to as simply Firefox and Mozilla
prefers it be abbreviated as Fx or fx. The Firefox project went through many versions before 1.0
was released on November 9, 2004.
In addition to stability and security fixes, the Mozilla Foundation released its first major update to Firefox version 1.5 on November 29, 2005.
On October 24, 2006, Mozilla released Firefox 2.
This version includes updates to the tabbed browsing environment, the extensions manager, the GUI, and the find, search and software update engines; a new session restore feature; inline spell checking;
and an anti-phishing feature which was implemented by Google as an extension,and later merged into the program itself.
In December 2007, Firefox Live Chat was launched.
It allows users to ask volunteers questions through a system powered by Jive Software, with guaranteed hours of operation and
the possibility of help after hours. Features included with Firefox are tabbed browsing, spell checker, incremental find, live bookmarking, an integrated download manager, and a search system that includes Google.
The developers of Firefox aimed to produce a browser that "just surfs the web" and delivers the "best possible browsing experience
to the widest possible set of people." Users can customize Firefox with extensions and themes.
Mozilla maintains an add-on repository at addons.mozilla.org with nearly 2000 add-ons in it as of September 2007. 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. Mozilla Firefox supports many web standards, including HTML, XML, XHTML, SVG 1.1 (partial), CSS, ECMAScript (JavaScript), DOM, MathML, DTD, XSLT, XPath, and PNG images with alpha transparency.
Firefox also supports standards proposals created by the WHATWG such as client-side storage,and canvas element. Although Firefox 2 does not pass the Acid2 standards-compliance test,
Firefox 3 Beta 2 does. 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 January 07, 2008, Firefox 2 has five security vulnerabilities unpatched, the most severe of which was rated "less critical" by Secunia.
Internet Explorer has seven security vulnerabilities unpatched, the most severe of which was rated "Moderately critical" by Secunia.