Mozilla Firefox has never come standard with any computer. Whether you have a Mac or a PC, you were given either Safari or Internet Explorer respectively. Yet even without these default installation, Firefox has quickly become one of the most popular web browsers available to the consumer today. With open-source technology, the browser is now known to be very stable with web developers taking a strong liking to its add-on capabilities as well as its speed.
Mozilla Firefox was developed by the Mozilla Foundation, and uses a Gecko layout engine to render webpages. This engine is said to be about 30% faster than versions of Internet Explorer that were available before IE9. While the browser commands about 25% of computers worldwide, it is most popular in Indonesia, Germany, and Poland. It was one of the only browser alternatives during its initial release in 2004, and was adopted quickly by those who were once extremely frustrated by their obligation to use Internet Explorer. In the first year of availability alone, it was downloaded more than 100 million times.
Firefox’s open-source platform gave it the power to never be restricted to an operating system, developers have worked quickly over the years to make it available on both Windows and Apple operating systems for both desktop computers and mobile devices.
The most appealing feature of Firefox is the add-on capability, which was quickly adopted by other browsers shortly after Firefox released the feature. By allowing developers to create plug-ins for the browser, users could take advantage of the web browser for conducting research on web pages, including the ability to analyze and edit code in real time, which has been known to save web developers countless hours of work.
To date, Firefox has been downloaded well over one billion times. There have been 15 different versions of Firefox released since 2004, and the Mozilla Foundation shows no signs of slowing down. In several cases, large corporations have asked their employees to use Firefox’s stable web browser by default due to its exceptional security features. It was passed as the 2nd most popular browser in December of 2011 by Google Chrome.
So what are your thoughts? Is Mozilla Firefox – The Best Web Platform?
