ResearchFirefox - The Browser That Tamed the Internet
Firefox, the open source web browser, has climbed in recent years to well past 25% and heading towards an even bigger piece of the browser market. Even some users who stick to Microsoft use the Windows port of Firefox. The Microsoft default choice, Internet Explorer, has been so plagued by problems and security flaws that one in four users have simply given up on it. Web masters across the net push for Firefox, too, jumping at the chance to design web pages according to actual web standards, instead of having to wreck everything just so IE can read it.
Firefox comes from a historic lineage which is an epic in itself. You have to go back to 1992, when the Mosaic web browser was first started on the Unix X windows system by the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) funded by the High-Performance Computing and Communications Initiative, which was a government program created by the High Performance Computing Act of 1991. Microsoft was to buy a license for Mosaic's code, which they modified into Internet Explorer and have stuck with even since. The Mosaic Communications Corporation begat the company which would become Netscape in 1994, and changed Mosaic's name to Netscape Navigator. Netscape, as is famously reported by uber-geek Jamie Zawinski who was on the Netscape staff, begat the open-source Mozilla project in 1998. And from the fertile loins of the Mozilla web browser was born Firefox by Dave Hyatt and Blake Ross in 2002, naming it first "Phoenix" and later staying with the name Firefox in 2003. There it is in one paragraph! Clip and save for your next browser debate.
Firefox, then, represents the spirit of open source since before open source was a concept, and inherits the very first implementation of the concept of a web browser, while at the same time being the very latest in web technology thanks to it's continuous redevelopment. It is feature-rich beyond all other web browsers, and is so far the only web browser which can be styled with themes and the only one to support scripted third-party plug-ins. Many features which Firefox inherited from Mozilla, such as tabbed browsing, which allows multiple pages to be open at once in a single instance, and a search-box in the toolbar which can act as a launcher for search-engine queries, have only just now in 2006 been tried out in Internet Explorer.
The overwhelming competition from Firefox has prompted Microsoft to make a historic move; as of 2006 they have openly invited the Firefox development team to come to the Microsoft campus in order to ensure that Firefox will work well on the upcoming release of Vista. This may be a sign that even Microsoft in the future might acknowledge the contributions of open source to their own platform's usability and possibly even indicate a new era of peace between open source and proprietary software.
Extensions, plug-ins, and themes for Firefox, in true open-source style, are being developed constantly by it's fan base. These extras may be downloaded from the Firefox site. Themes can style the browser to look like anything imaginable, and the plug-ins cover a range of functions from the geeky technical to the practical to the just plain silly toys. Which makes quite a bit of sense, considering that a web browser is the program you have open the most on your computer desktop, anyway.