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The developers of Firefox aim to produce a browser that "just works" for most casual users. User created Extensions and plugins can be installed to integrate with Firefox giving a wide range of choice for the end-user. The main features included with Firefox are tabbed browsing, incremental find, live bookmarking, a customizable download manager and a built-in Search toolbar. The user can customise their version of Firefox with downloadable extensions, a variety of different themes and skins, and many hidden preferences that are easily accessible to the advanced user.

Mozilla Firefox claims support for many software standards, including but not restricted to: HTML, XML, XHTML, CSS, ECMAScript (JavaScript), DOM, MathML, DTD, XSL, SVG, XPath and PNG images with variable transparency. Firefox release builds do not yet pass the Acid2 standards-compliance test. However, there are developmental versions of Firefox that currently pass the Acid2 test, and Firefox 3 is expected to pass Acid2.

Mozilla Firefox is a multi-platform browser, providing support for various versions of Microsoft Windows, including 98, 98SE, Me, NT 4.0, 2000, XP, and Server 2003. It also runs on Mac OS X, and the Linux-based operating systems using the X Window System. Although not officially released for certain operating systems, the freely available source code works for many other operating systems, including but not restricted to: FreeBSD, OS/2, Solaris, SkyOS, BeOS and more recently, Windows XP Professional x64 Edition.

Firefox also provides an environment in which web developers can use built in tools (from extensions). These include a Javascript Console, a DOM Inspector, Venkman JavaScript debugger, and an integrated development toolkit called Web Developer.

The fact that Firefox has fewer and less severe publicly known unpatched security vulnerabilities than Internet Explorer is often cited as a reason to switch from Internet Explorer to Firefox for improved security. However, recent studies show that Firefox has surpassed Internet Explorer in the amount of vulnerabilities in the year 2006 (through September 2006).

Firefox uses SSL/TLS to protect communications with web servers using strong cryptography. It also supports smartcards for secure login to web servers. It uses a sandbox security model and the developers use a "bug bounty" scheme, for finding fixes for some security and feature additions.

Performance

Internet Week ran an article in which many readers reported anecdotes of high memory usage in Firefox 1.5. Mozilla developers claim the higher memory use of Firefox 1.5 is sometimes at least partially an effect of the new fast backwards and forwards (FastBack) feature. Other known causes of memory problems are misbehaving extensions, such as Google Toolbar and Adblock. However, when PC Magazine compared memory usage of Firefox, Opera, and Internet Explorer, they found that Firefox seemed to use only about as much memory as the other browsers. Tests performed by PC World and Zimbra indicate that Firefox 2 uses less memory than Internet Explorer 7.

Softpedia notes that Firefox takes longer to start up than other browsers and browser speed tests confirm this to be the case. Some note that Firefox takes longer to launch than other browsers such as Internet Explorer or Opera on Windows. Other Gecko-based browsers such as K-Meleon, which use platform-native user interface implementations, generally run faster than Firefox. IE also launches slightly faster than Firefox on Microsoft Windows since many of its components are built into Windows and are loaded during system startup. On Microsoft Windows, this can be addressed by using the open-source FFPreloader Utility.

Licensing

Firefox is an open-source application, trilicensed under the Mozilla Public License (MPL), GNU General Public License (GPL), and the GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL). The licenses permit anyone to view the source code, as well as modifying and redistributing it (though with trademark restrictions). Netscape and Flock are examples of software based on Firefox code.

The Free Software Foundation (FSF) considers the official Firefox binaries released by Mozilla to not be free software because they include the proprietary crash reporter Talkback, have trademark restrictions, and force the user to accept a clickwrap agreement (the latter only applies to the Windows version). Google and Mozilla developers are working on Airbag, an open-source replacement for Talkback, that will allow official Firefox builds to be entirely free of proprietary software.

In the past, Firefox was licensed solely under the Mozilla Public License (MPL). The FSF criticizes the MPL for being weak copyleft; the license permits, in limited ways, proprietary, derivative works. Code under the MPL also cannot be legally linked with code under the GNU General Public License (GPL) or the GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL). To address these concerns, Mozilla tri-licensed Firefox under the MPL, GPL, and LGPL, which permits developers to use whichever license they wish in creating derivative works. The effect of the tri-licensing is that developers can legally link Firefox code with GPL or LGPL code, but still allows them to create proprietary, derivative works (though not both at once).

In September 2006, Mozilla requested Debian not to use the official Firefox name for its own patched version. Mozilla requires that distribution of builds called "Firefox" include the official artwork and that any changes made to the Firefox code required approval by Mozilla. Since the official artwork is trademarked and copyrighted, thus going against the Debian Free Software Guidelines, and since Debian didn't want to go through Mozilla to make changes, Debian decided to fork Firefox into IceWeasel.

History
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Market adoption
Community and unofficial versions