About Firefox

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Mozilla Firefox is a graphical web browser developed by the Mozilla Corporation and a large community of external contributors. Firefox, officially abbreviated as Fx or fx and popularly abbreviated FF, started as a fork of the Navigator browser component of the Mozilla Application Suite. Firefox has replaced the Mozilla Suite as the flagship product of the Mozilla project, under the direction of the Mozilla Foundation.

Mozilla Firefox is a cross-platform browser, providing support for various versions of Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux. However, the source code has been unofficially ported to other operating systems, including FreeBSD,OS/2, Solaris, SkyOS, BeOS and more recently, Windows XP Professional x64 Edition.

Firefox's source code is freely available under the terms of the Mozilla tri-license as free and open source software. The current stable release of Firefox is version 2.0.0.3, released on March 20, 2007.

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 pared-down 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).

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فایرفاکس مدعی رکورد دانلود شد


طرفداران فایرفاکس در سراسر دنیا جشن دانلود به راه انداختند
موزیلا ادعا می کند که با عرضه فایرفاکس 3 رکورد تازه ای در تعداد دانلود به ثبت رسانده است.
موسسه "موزیلا"، سازنده مرور گر فایرفاکس Firefox اعلام کرده که در فاصله 24 ساعت پس از عرضه نسل سوم فایرفاکس، این مرورگر وب بیش از هشت میلیون بار از روی اینترنت دانلود شده است.

این آمار در حال بررسی است تا آماری رسمی تهیه و در اختیار موسسه "رکوردهای جهانی گینس" Guinness World Record قرار گیرد.

در عین حال عرضه فایرفاکس تحت تاثیر گزارشی دایر بر وجود یک ایراد هم قرار گرفته که از طرف شرکتی که در مورد امنیت کامپیوترها فعالیت می کند منتشر شده است.

آمار بیش از انتظار

قرار شده بود که رکوردگیری برای تعداد دانلود از ساعت هشت شب به وقت گرینیچ در روز 17 ژوئن آغاز شود. اما تلاش برای ثبت رکورد به دلیل بروز اشکال در سرورهای موزیلا با شکست روبرو شد.

تعداد بسیار زیاد متقاضیان دانلود فایرفاکس 3 باعث شد تا بار سرورها زیاد شود و آنها از کار بیفتند. ثبت رکورد پس از راه اندازی مجدد سرورها دوباره آغاز شد.

سرورها در شلوغترین زمان بیش از نه هزار تقاضا برای دانلود در هر دقیقه را پاسخ می دادند.

در طول پنج ساعت تعداد دانلودهای فایرفاکس 3، از 1.6 میلیون نسخه گذشت. این رکورد تعداد دانلودهای نسخه پیشین فایرفاکس بود که در ماه اکتبر سال 2006 به ثبت رسیده بود.

با اینکه موزیلا یک روز قبل از رکورد گیری پیش بینی کرده بود که نسخه جدید موزیلا پنج میلیون بار دانلود شود، در مجموع در طول بیست و چهار ساعت فایرفاکس 3، هشت میلیون و سیصد هزار بار دانلود شد.

اکنون اسناد مربوط به تعداد دانلودها برای بررسی به "اوپن سورس لب" Open Source Labs ، وابسته به "دانشگاه ایالتی اورِگِن" Oregon State University فرستاده شده است.

در شمارش تعداد دانلودها، دانلودهای تکراری و همینطور دانلودهایی که به طور کامل انجام نشده اند در نظر گرفته نخواهند شد و شمارش تعداد کل دانلودها ممکن است تا یک هفته طول بکشد.

پس از پایان زمان رکوردگیری هنوز هم علاقه به دانلود فایرفاکس وجود دارد به طوریکه موزیلا گزارش داده که تعداد دانلود این مرورگر وب از ده میلیون نسخه هم گذشته است.

با این حال درخشش موزیلا با خبر پیدا شدن یک ایراد در آن کمرنگ شد. این ایراد توسط یک شرکت که در امر امنیت در وب فعالیت می کند گزارش شده است.

این شرکت که "دی وی لبز/تیپینگ پوینت" DV Labs/Tipping Point نام دارد تنها پنج ساعت پس از عرضه فایرفاکس 3 این ایراد را گزارش داد.

اینطور که گزارش شده، مهاجمین می توانند کاربران را در مرورگر فایرفاکس 3 در تله های اینترنتی به دام بیاندازند و در صورتی که کاربر بر روی تله اینترنتی آنها کلیک کند، مهاجمین قادر خواهند بود کنترل کامپیوتر را در اختیار گیرند.

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Users running Firefox along with popular Norton security programs have reported problems after updating the browser to version 3.0.1, according to messages on Symantec Corp.'s and Mozilla Corp.'s support forums.

Mozilla confirmed the accounts Thursday.

"Some of the problems seem to be related to Identity Safe, which is a feature of Norton 360 and other Norton and Symantec offerings," said Mike Beltzner, Mozilla's director for Firefox. "[But] it's not clear that all of the problems are related to that single feature."

Beltzner was responding to questions about post-update problems mentioned during Mozilla's weekly Firefox status meeting on Wednesday, when the Norton 360 issue was brought up.

Messages posted by Symantec customers and Firefox users pointed to a wide range of problems with both Norton titles and Firefox, but a majority of the latter said their bookmarks had gone missing, as had the back and forward buttons, after they updated to 3.0.1. Mozilla started pitching that version to users of the older Firefox 2.0.0.16 last week when it turned on an automatic update offer.

Firefox users have been reporting the problem for months -- Firefox 3.0 launched in mid-June -- but the automatic update appeared to push the issue to the forefront.

Symantec customers, meanwhile, complained about the disappearance of Identity Safe, a password manager that's bundled with numerous Symantec security products, including Norton 360 2.0 and Norton Internet Security 2008, after upgrading Firefox.

"I just installed Firefox 3 under XP and have apparently lost Identity Safe which I depend on," said a user identified as "BobinVA" on a Symantec forum in a message posted last Sunday. "How can I get it back?"

Beltzner said Mozilla and Symantec are on the case. "We're working with people from Norton to try and understand the problems better," he said. "To date, though, neither we nor Norton have been unable to reproduce the problem in our QA labs."

According to Beltzner, older installations of Norton software, most likely those that haven't been kept up-to-date with downloads from Symantec, seem to prevent Firefox from terminating properly when the browser shuts down. "When the user starts up Firefox the next time, the file that's used to store their bookmarks and history can't be read, and as a result the back and forward buttons don't work and no bookmarks are shown," he said. "This coincides with the Identity Safe feature not working as well."

Some users had reported that a reboot ended their problems, Beltzner said. Others have used a Mozilla support document titled "Configuring Norton 360" to quash the issue. "We'll keep looking into the problem, and while it's not happening for all Norton and Firefox users, we understand that for the users it is affecting, it's a significant problem," Beltzner said.

For its part, Symantec urged users of Norton Internet Security 2008 to first update to version 15.5, which in turn would allow them to download and install a Firefox 3.0 compatibility update. A separate Firefox 3.0 compatibility patch is available for Norton 360. Both patches can be obtained by launching Symantec's Live Update feature from within the security applications.

This wouldn't be the first time that Symantec's Norton software has created problems for other vendors. In May, shortly after Microsoft Corp. launched Windows XP Service Pack 3 (SP3), users blamed the Symantec programs for crippling their PCs after they updated to SP3.

Initially, Symantec said the bug was Microsoft's fault, but it accepted some responsibility, saying the combination of a flawed Microsoft process and the SymProtect feature in its Norton software had added errant entries to XP's registry. Later Symantec released a free tool that cleaned up the corrupted registry keys.

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http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/best-firefox-addons-for-enhancing-security-and-privacy/

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http://www.instantfundas.com/2009/05/mozilla-jetpack-lets-you-build-your-own.html