Firefox

Draft

Definition

Mozilla Firefox is a graphical web browser developed by the Mozilla Corporation and a large community of external contributors. Firefox, officially abbreviated as Fx or fx and popularly, but improperly, abbreviated FF, started as a fork of the Navigator browser component of the Mozilla Application Suite. Firefox has replaced the Mozilla Suite as the flagship product of the Mozilla project, under the direction of the Mozilla Foundation (Wikipedia, retrieved 18:54, 12 October 2007 (MEST)).

As of october 2007 market share is about 15%. Market share in education is probably much higher.

Standards support

Firefox 2.0

Natively, Firefox 2.0 supports these major standards:

• HTML (almost completely, e.g. not the "link" element)
• XHTML 1.0 and 1.1 (almost completely)
• SVG (partially)
• CSS 2 (partially)
• JavaScript and ECMAScript 3 (including DOM 1/2 and XHMLHttpRequest)
• MathML
• XSLT 1 (almost completely)
• XPath
• RSS
• XLink (only a little subset)
• XForms (to what extent ?)

It does not support

• SMIL
• X3D (but on PC's there exist plugins)
• XSL/FO
• VoiceML
• DOM 3

Essential plugins

• PDF
• Java (at least for science educators)
• Flash

Things that don't work well

• Management of helper applications for Mimetypes. Daniel K. Schneider thinks that this is a nightmare, in particular on Linux.

Useful add-ons

See Browser_extension#Firefox_extensions Browser extensions

Installing more than one version of Firefox

Under Windows

• See Install Two Different Versions Of Firefox On The Same Computer (Techarena.net, retrieved Aug 2010).

Under Ubuntu

Here is is an explanation by example. You may have to become root or add sudo in front of each command ...

(1) Go to the install mother directory, e.g. /usr/local

cd /usr/local

(2) get the thing from, e.g. from http://nightly.mozilla.org/

For example:

wget http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/nightly/latest-trunk/firefox-4.0b5pre.en-US.linux-i686.tar.bz2

(3) Look at it

tar jtvf firefox-4.0b5pre.en-US.linux-i686.tar.bz2

(4) Extract

tar jxf firefox-4.0b5pre.en-US.linux-i686.tar.bz2

this will create a firefox directory.

(5) Move the directory

mv firefox firefox-4b5

... of course, a real Unix person could do steps 2-5 with a single step. I am not.

(6) Create a backup of your profiles

• Become yourself again if you were root (for the following operations).
• If you are afraid, create a backup first.

cp -rp ~/.mozilla/firefox ~/.firefox-backup

(7) Crucial - Create a new profile for the new version.

• Else you will be very sorry, e.g. your default profile will be overwritten.
• Read Command line arguments (MozillaZines).
• Now, use your "normal Firefox" to manage profiles.

Alternative (a): The following command will launch a new instance of Firefox, i.e. just the Profile Manager.

firefox -no-remote -ProfileManager

Then click on "Create Profile", e.g. call it version4-testing

Alternative (b):

firefox -no-remote -CreateProfile version4-testing

(8) Now cd to the newly installed Firefox directory and type:

./firefox -no-remote -P version4-testing 

Of course, make sure that the profile version4-testing exists. Or at least that you don't start Firefox without the -P switch. no-remote means that you can have another version running at the same time (roughly).

Links

• Comparison of web browsers (Wikipedia)

• Firefox 2.0 and XML, IBM Developper Works