Overview and History
And the relationship to Mozilla
Mozilla Firefox is a web browser project managed by the Mozilla Corporation. Firefox's source code is available under the terms of the Mozilla tri-license as free and open source software. By one measure Firefox has 14.85% of the world's market share in Web browsers as of October 2007, making it the world's second most popular browser.
Features included with Firefox are tabbed browsing, spell checker, incremental find, live bookmarking, an integrated download manager, and a search system that includes Google. A third party developer network has created add-ons which provide specialist functionality. There are more than 2,000 add-ons, with the most popular including FoxyTunes (controls music players), Adblock Plus (ad blocker), StumbleUpon (website discovery), DownThemAll! (download functions) and Web Developer (web tools).
Firefox is cross-platform, providing support for various versions of Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X and Linux. The current stable release of Firefox is version 2.0.0.10, released on 26 November 2007.
History
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 (Firefox for short).
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.
Source: http://www.wikipedia.com