New Versions of Mozilla

Version 3.0

Mozilla Firefox (codename Minefield), version 3.0a1 (pre-Alpha) running on Windows XP

The development name for Mozilla Firefox 3 is Gran Paradiso. The precursory releases were codenamed "Minefield", as this was the name of the trunk builds. "Gran Paradiso", like other Firefox development names, is an actual place. "Gran Paradiso" is the name of a national park in Italy. With the release of version 3.0 alpha 1 on December 8, 2006, it adopted the "Gran Paradiso" codename. The release timeframe for Firefox 3 is May 2007.

The largest change for Firefox 3 will be the implementation of Gecko 1.9, an updated layout engine (more correctly big changes to the reflow code and migration of nsTextFrame to the Thebes infrastructure). Firefox 3 will also include several new features and some that were bumped from Firefox 2, such as the overhauled Places system for storing bookmarks and history in an SQLite backend. Due to Microsoft's decision to end support for Windows 98 and Windows Me on July 11, 2006, and because Cairo does not support Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows Me, and Windows NT 4.0, Firefox 3 will not run on those operating systems. Unlike previous versions, Firefox 3 on Mac OS X will use a Cocoa widget implementation.^[

The development team is also asking that Firefox users submit feature requests that they wish to be included in Firefox 3.

Version 4.0

On October 13, 2006, Brendan Eich, Mozilla's Chief Technology Officer, wrote about the plans for Mozilla 2.0, the platform on which Firefox 4 is likely to be based. These changes include improving and removing XPCOM APIs, switching to standard C++ features, just-in-time compilation with JavaScript 2 (known as the Tamarin project), and tool-time and runtime security checks.

Features

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 customize 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. 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. A 2006 Symantec study showed that Firefox had surpassed Internet Explorer in the number of vendor-confirmed vulnerabilities that year through to September, though these were patched more quickly than vulnerabilities found in other browsers. Symantec later clarified their statement, saying that Firefox still had fewer security vulnerabilities, as counted by security researchers.

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.