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
• DOM 1 and 2
• MathML
• XSLT 1 (almost completely)
• XPath
• RSS
• XLink (only a little subset)
• XForms (to what extent ?)

It does not support

• SMILE
• 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

Contents/Browsing

• Wizz RSS News Reader
• ColorfulTabs

Search

• googlebar

Downloading / Links

• DownloadHelper Download videos from YouTube etc.
• PDF Download (let's choose what to do with a PDF)
• Resurrect Pages (find dead pages in archives)
• COLT (copy links)

Development

• HTML Validator
• CSS Validator
• Rainbowpicker (a little color picker)
• Web Developer
• XML Developer Toolbar

Links

• Comparison of web browsers (Wikipedia)

• Firefox 2.0 and XML, IBM Developper Works