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Benefits Of The Firefox Browser

Author: ChrisChanning
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Word Count: 572
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The Firefox brand of web browser is one that many Internet users both know and love. But what many don't know is that the browser first got its roots in an entirely different browser altogether- Netscape Navigator. Because of the hot war between Microsoft's Internet Explorer and Netscape Navigator, Netscape eventually decided to release their source code as an open source item to be viewed and developed by any who wished. This decision led to the founding of the Mozilla Firefox project, previously know as Firebird, in 1998. Ever since the critical acclaim that Firefox obtained after its mainstream success, it seems that the browser has been outperforming each and every release of Internet Explorer that comes out in recent months. After all, the long development time and open source movement can be quite a powerful tool indeed.

Mozilla Firefox, presently the safest browser available, is backed up by huge community of active volunteer coders who have been with them since the time of Netscape halcyon days. The absence of Active X components, which are widely used to install spy wares as in the case of IE users, makes Firefox a safe browsing experience. Also, what clearly demarcates the IE and Firefox is the frequency of updates that the later receives. If vulnerability is found it is corrected and updated within few days or even within few hours whereas IE receives no updates for years!

Those who are looking to save some disk space should also opt for Mozilla Firefox, as it comes it at a small 4.9 megabytes in size. This is compared to the 80 megabytes that Internet Explorer requires for its bulky code- of which is unnecessarily large.

Rendering is important in a browser, with much hype put around the Acid 2 test that measures how well a browser can display things correctly on a webpage. Firefox uses the Gecko engine, which is very precise and hasty, yet fails the Acid 2 test. But in comparison to Internet Explorer, Firefox does much better on the test in the end.

An interesting feature of Firefox is the installation of themes and extensions which makes the browser user customized, a feature which is absent in IE. These themes and extensions are available at the Mozilla and other web developers Websites. The extensions can be added to perform a specific operation for the users such as adblock, Gmail notifier, etc.

Firefox has long been given popularity due to the simple fact that it supports tabbed browsing. Some versions of Internet Explorer allow for this feat, but Internet Explorer doesn't handle memory usage properly, and lagging is a common repercussion. Opera is another example of a browser that uses tabbed browsing, but expands on the idea by offering thumbnail previews.

The latest addition in the inventory of Firefox 2 is the session restore. If you are in the middle of typing a long e-mail and suddenly your system hangs or crashes, then Firefox latest "session restore" feature comes to your aid. It restores all your tabs that were there before the system crashed with all your work intact! Also, spell check feature, derived from word processor, gives you ability to correct your spelling mistakes online with a click of mouse.

The future development of Firefox versions has already been started and version 3 which is likely to pass Acid 2 test is expected to release in June 2008. With this release Firefox is set to show doors to IE legacy.