Here in this article we given history of mozilla firefox. We tested our site with every firefox version and given the sanup shots. The The Mozilla Firefox project was created by Dave Hyatt and Blake Ross as an experimental branch of the Mozilla project.
Firefox 1.0 was released on November 9, 2004. Firefox 1.5 was released on November 29, 2005. Version 2.0 was released on October 24, 2006 and Firefox 3.0 was released on June 17, 2008. Version 3.5 was released on June 30, 2009 and Version 3.6 was released on January 21, 2010.
history of mozilla firefox
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Early History
Hyatt, Hewitt and Ross’s browser was created to combat the perceived software bloat of the Mozilla Suite (codenamed, internally referred to, and continued by the community as SeaMonkey), which integrated features such as IRC, mail and news, and WYSIWYG HTML editing into one software suite.
Firefox retains the cross-platform nature of the original Mozilla browser, using the XUL user interface markup language. The use of XUL makes it possible to extend the browser’s capabilities through the use of extensions and themes. The development and installation processes of these add-ons raised security concerns, and with the release of Firefox 0.9, the Mozilla Foundation opened a Mozilla Update website containing “approved” themes and extensions. The use of XUL sets Firefox apart from other browsers, including other projects based on Mozilla’s Gecko layout engine and most other browsers, which use interfaces native to their respective platforms (Galeon and Epiphany use GTK+; K-Meleon uses MFC; and Camino uses Cocoa). Many of these projects were started before Firefox, and probably served as inspiration.
Although the Mozilla Foundation had intended to make the Mozilla Suite obsolete and to replace it with Firefox, the Foundation continued to maintain the suite until April 12, 2006[1] because it had many corporate users, as well as being bundled with other software. The Mozilla community (as opposed to the Foundation) continues to release new versions of the suite using the product name SeaMonkey to avoid any possible confusion with the original Mozilla Suite.
On February 5, 2004 the business and IT consulting company AMS categorized Mozilla Firefox (then Firebird) as a “Tier 1” (meaning “Best of Breed”) open source product.[2] This meant that AMS considered Firebird (as it was called at the time) to be virtually risk-free and technically strong.
Phoenix 0.1, the first official release.
Firefox 1.0, the first release targeted for general public.
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Naming
The project which became Firefox started as an experimental branch of the Mozilla Suite called m/b (or mozilla/browser). When sufficiently developed, binaries for public testing appeared in September 2002 under the name Phoenix.
The Phoenix name was retained until April 14, 2003 when it was changed (after a short stint as Phoenix Browser) due to trademark issues with the BIOS manufacturer, Phoenix Technologies (who produce a BIOS-based browser called Phoenix FirstWare Connect). The new name, Firebird, was met with mixed reactions, particularly as the Firebird database server already carried the name. In late April, following a name change to Firebird browser (which lasted only a few hours), the Mozilla Foundation issued an official statement which stated that the browser should be referred to as Mozilla Firebird (as opposed to just Firebird). Continuing pressure from the Firebird community forced another change, and on February 9, 2004 the project was renamed Mozilla Firefox (or Firefox for short).
The name, “Firefox”, was chosen for its similarity to “Firebird”, but also for its uniqueness in the computing industry. To ensure that no further name changes would be necessary, the Mozilla Foundation began the process of registering Firefox[3] as a trademark with the United States Patent and Trademark Office in December 2003. This trademark process led to a delay of several months in the release of Firefox 0.8 when the foundation discovered that in the UK Firefox had already been registered[4][dead link] as a trademark for software by The Charlton Company.[5] The situation was resolved when the foundation was given a license to use Charlton’s European trademark.
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Branding and visual identity
Early Firebird and Phoenix releases of Firefox were considered to have had reasonable visual designs, but were not up to the same standard as many professionally released software packages. In October 2003, professional interface designer, Steven Garrity, wrote an article covering everything he considered to be wrong with Mozilla’s visual identity.[6] The page received a great deal of attention. The majority of the criticisms levelled at the article were along the lines of “where’s the patch?”
Shortly afterwards, Garrity was invited by the Mozilla Foundation to head up the new visual identity team. The release of Firefox 0.8 in February 2004 saw the introduction of the new branding efforts, including new icons designed by silverorange, a group of web developers with a long-standing relationship with Mozilla, with final renderings by Jon Hicks, who had previously worked on Camino.[8][9] The logo was revised and updated later, fixing some flaws found when the logo was enlarged.[10]
The animal shown in the logo is a stylized fox, although “firefox” is considered to be a common name for the Red Panda. The panda, according to Hicks, “didn’t really conjure up the right imagery”, besides not being widely known.[9] The logo was chosen for the purpose of making an impression, while not shouting out with overdone artwork. The logo had to stand out in the user’s mind, be easy for others to remember and stand out while not causing too much distraction when among other icons. It was expected to be the final logo for the product.
The Firefox icon is a trademark used to designate the official Mozilla build of the Firefox software, and builds of official distribution partners.[11] For this reason, Debian and other software distributors who distribute patched or modified versions of Firefox do not use the icon. The crash reporting service was previously closed-source, but switched with version 3, going from a program called Talkback, to the open source BreakPad & Socorro.
Various logos used during the development of Firefox.
Blue globe artwork is distributed with Firefox source code, and is explicitly not protected as a trademark.
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“Delicious delicacies”
Early Firefox releases featured a preferences panel that described cookies by stating “Cookies are delicious delicacies”.
The phrase was representative of the programmers’ quirky sense of humor and a general reflection of the free software movement’s unconventional approach. The phrase became something of a cult legend and was even featured in an O’Reilly computer book.
The original text was inserted by Blake Ross, one of the lead developers of Firefox, because, he says, “describing something so complicated in such a small space was quite frankly the last thing I wanted to worry about after rewriting the cookie manager”.
However, in reflection of the growing acceptance and use of the Firefox browser in the Internet mainstream, the text was later changed. It was considered[12] a bug and was “fixed” by Mike Connor to read “Cookies are pieces of information stored by web pages on your computer. They are used to remember login information and other data”. The revision was regarded as more likely to be helpful for the less technically oriented computer users who were now using Firefox—representing Mozilla’s desire to appeal to mainstream users.
After this happened, the following remarks were made by Blake Ross over IRC to Mike Connor:
congratulations mconnor
you just destroyed a legend!
The text became a popular in-joke and on August 2004, the Delicious Delicacies extension, which is no longer maintained and updated, was released by Jesse Ruderman. This extension restored the old description of cookies, available in several languages.
As of Firefox 2.0, cookies no longer have a description in the preferences window.
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Version 1.5
On June 23, 2005, the Mozilla Foundation announced that Firefox 1.1 (which became Firefox 1.5) and other new Mozilla products will no longer support Mac OS X v10.1. This is intended to improve the quality of Firefox releases on Mac OS X v10.2 and above. Users of 10.1 could still use Firefox versions from the 1.0.x branch (e.g. Firefox 1.0.7).
Firefox 1.5 was released on November 30, 2005. The original plan was for a Firefox 1.1 and later a Firefox 1.5. After the first two 1.1 alpha builds, the Mozilla Foundation abandoned the 1.1 release plan and merged it with the planned feature set of 1.5 instead, with 1.5 being released later than was planned for 1.1. The new version resynchronised the code-base of the release builds (as opposed to nightly builds) with the core “trunk” which contained additional features not available in 1.0, as it branched from the trunk around the 0.9 release. As such, there was a backlog of bug fixes between 0.9 and the release of 1.0, which were made available in 1.5. Version 1.5 implemented a new Mac-like options interface, which was the subject of much criticism from Windows and Linux users, with a “Sanitize” action to allow a person to clear their privacy related information without manually clicking the “Clear All” button. In Firefox 1.5, a user can clear all privacy-related settings simply by exiting the browser or using a keyboard shortcut, depending on their settings. Moreover, the software update system was improved (with binary patches now possible). There were also improvements in the extension management system, with a number of new developer features.
Also, Firefox 1.5 had preliminary SVG 1.1 support.[13] This unplanned movement may have been due to the release of Opera 8.0 on April 19, 2005, which supported SVG Tiny.[speculation?]
Alpha builds of Firefox 1.5 (1.1a1 and 1.1a2) did not contain Firefox branding. They were labeled “Deer Park” (which was Firefox 1.5’s internal codename) and contained a different program icon. This was done to dissuade end-users from downloading preview versions, which are intended for developers only.
Firefox 1.5.0.12 is the final version supported on Windows 95.
“Deer Park”, the codename of the Firefox 1.1 and 1.5 Alphas, did not include Firefox branding.
Updated options window introduced in Firefox 1.5
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Version 2
On March 22, 2006, the first alpha version of Firefox 2 (Bon Echo Alpha 1) was released. It featured Gecko 1.8.1 for the first time.
Firefox 2 was released on October 24, 2006 and contained many new features not found in Firefox 1.5, including improved support for SVG and JavaScript 1.7, as well as UI changes.
Mozilla Firefox 2.0.0.x is the final version supported on Windows NT 4.0, 98 and Me. Mozilla Corporation has announced that it will not develop new versions of Firefox 2 after the 2.0.0.20 release. They did however continue development of Firefox 2 as long as other programs, like the Thunderbird mail client, were depending on it. The final internal release was 2.0.0.22, released in late April 2009.
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Firefox Live Chat
In December 2007, Firefox Live Chat was launched. It allows users to ask volunteers questions with hours of operation and the possibility of help after hours. Because this service is kept running because of volunteers, if there are not enough volunteers to help, they may not open during the official hours.
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Version 3.0
The Mozilla Foundation released Firefox 3 on June 17, 2008. The first Firefox 3 beta (under codename ‘Gran Paradiso’). had been released several months earlier on 19 November 2007, which was followed by several more beta releases in the Spring of 2008 culminating in the June release.
One of the major changes in Firefox 3 is the implementation of Gecko 1.9, an updated layout engine. The new version fixes many bugs and implements new web APIs.
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Version 3.5
After several development releases, the final version was released on June 30, 2009. The current version is 3.5.10, released on June 22, 2010. Also, as of mid-December 2009, Firefox 3.5 is the most popular browser (when counting individual browser versions) passing Internet Explorer 7. It is the first version to accomplish this feat.
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Version 3.6
Version 3.6, released on January 21, 2010, uses the Gecko 1.9.2 engine and includes several interface improvements, such as “personas.” This release was referred to as 3.2 before 3.1 was changed to 3.5. The codename for this version was Namoroka.
One minor update to Firefox 3.6, version 3.6.4 (code-named Lorentz) is the first minor update to make non-intrusive changes other than minor stability and security fixes. It adds Out of Process Plugins (OOPP), which runs plugins in a separate process, allowing Firefox to recover from plugin crashes.
As part of Mozilla’s ongoing stability and security update process, Firefox 3.6.6 is now available as a free download for Windows, Mac, and Linux from http://www.firefox.com. This release makes a small change to the crash protection feature introduced in Firefox 3.6.4, increasing the amount of time that Firefox will allow a plugin to remain frozen before terminating it. For more information, see the Mozilla Blog announcement about the release.
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Future releases
The precursory releases of upcoming Firefox releases are codenamed “Minefield”, as this is the name of the trunk builds. As of June 2010, development for Firefox 4 takes place on the Mozilla trunk, with pre-release builds coming nightly.
Version 4.0
Nightly builds were marked as 4.0a1pre between February and June of 2008,[21][22] but were renamed to 3.1a1pre afterward.
Firefox 3.7 (Gecko 1.9.3) Alpha 1 was released on February 10, 2010.[23][24] Alpha 2 was released on March 1, 2010, Alpha 3 was released on March 17, and Alpha 4 was released on April 12, 2010. As of May 2010, Alpha 5 is being developed on the trunk. The version number 3.7 is a placeholder; this release is now planned to be Firefox 4.0 and is tentatively scheduled for November 2010.[25]
One of the main focuses is to improve the user interface. Mockups of a UI overhaul for the Windows version have been posted in the Mozilla Wiki. They show plans for many changes, including optionally display the tabs bar at the top of the window, integrating the status bar into the tab toolbar and integrating the search bar and the reload and stop buttons into the awesomebar.[26] The menu bar is not present in these mockups. The UI will use animations for manipulating tags and buttons.
The browser will be given a home tab. This will be similar to the new tab pages found in Internet Explorer 8 and Google Chrome. However, users are able to customise the button so that it takes the user to their homepage instead.
The installer on the Mac OS X will be redesigned to make installations easier. Also, the start up windows that appear when Firefox starts up will be eradicated to make the start up process quicker.
The preferences and add-ons manager windows will also be redesigned to better assist users.
“Door hanger” notifications will be added. This is to replace the current “bar” notifications, which can easily be spoofed by a web page.
The Gecko layout engine will be improved to support more HTML5 and CSS3 features.
As well as this, the Firefox Sync project will be integrated into the browser to allow users to sync things such as bookmarks and history with the cloud.
A new type of tab, called an application tab, can be placed in the tab bar. It is similar to the Mozilla Prism project, which allows web pages (such as Google Mail) to become applications.
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Release history
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