Mozilla Firefox 9.0.1

Developed by the Mozilla Foundation and released onto the web back in 2004, Firefox is an open-source web browser that takes the number one spot in the hearts of many users out there (including me) even though it is the second most successful browser on the market today. The number one spot and the lion’s share of the browser market goes to Microsoft and Internet Explorer, not because IE is somehow better than Firefox, but simply because it comes bundled with the Windows operating system.

Leaving popularity and market share aside, let’s focus on what the browser has to offer in terms of functionality. This is actually quite an easy topic – Firefox has everything. I can’t think of a feature that Firefox does not have. Here’s what I’m thinking about: tabbed browsing, incremental find, download manager, private browsing mode, spell checking, customization options, cross-platform support, open video support, web worker threads, native JSON support, downloadable fonts, extensive language support, security. The simple truth of the matter is that whatever feature you expect to get out of a browser, Firefox’s got it.

Instead of going around detailing the miles long list of features in the Firefox browser, here are the features that I’m sure you will appreciate the most, and some features that you may find annoying.

The first thing you will like about Firefox is its speed. The general consensus is that the fastest browser available for download to date is Google’s Chrome. Firefox is only marginally behind, meaning it is quite fast. Its TraceMonkey JavaScript engine provides enhanced performance as well as enhanced stability while the Gecko layout engine comes with speculative parsing for faster content rendering.

Speed is nothing if you don’t have a website to go to. In this regard you can use the simple bookmarking feature that Firefox comes with and save webpages to visit at your convenience. Or you could just take advantage of the “Awesome bar.” That’s how Mozilla calls the address bar, for one simple reason: it IS awesome. Instead of typing the exact URL address of web page and maybe get it right, you just type in what you remember about it. Say for example you visit the Thunderbird download page on FindMySoft; instead of typing the exact URL address, just type “thunderbird” and the link to the download page will be displayed. As time goes by and you use the awesome bar more often, it will actually get better. You will notice that you only need to type a couple of letters and the site you want to visit is auto-magically displayed.

Private Browsing Mode is one other feature that you will undoubtedly appreciate. Affectionately called “p*rn mode”, while it is turned on, this feature will not let the browser remember the sites you visit. While in Private Browsing Mode, the browser will not retain the following: visited web pages, form and search bar entries, passwords, download list entries, cookies, web cache files.

If you forget to turn Private Browsing Mode on, there is one other cool feature at you disposal: “Forget About This site.” The feature is available in show all history library. Or, you could click Tools -> Clear Recent History and delete the whole browsing history for the past 1, 2, 4 hours or the entire day.

If you want to customize the way the browser looks or enhance its functionality, there are numerous add-ons and plug-ins at your disposal. If you were to count them all, you would grow old trying to accomplish this task. To put it simply, there are endless customization options thanks to all these add-ons.

In the unfortunate event that you accidentally close a tab, Firefox comes with the option to restore them – click History -> Recently Closed Tabs -> select the tab you want to restore. In the unfortunate event that you close an entire window full of tabs by accident, Firefox can restore it just as easily. Simply click History -> Recently Closed Windows.

Tab Tearing is another innovative feature that Firefox provides. It goes something like this: grab a tab and drag it out of the window to spawn a new browser window and the other way around. It is an innovative concept, I will admit, but it is one that has had me up the walls on several occasions. When you have a twitchy mouse, you will find that just by clicking on the tab you want to switch to spawns a new window. I’m no blaming Mozilla for this, but I’m sure there are plenty of users out there that have to contend with less than perfect hardware.

Here is one other thing that you might find annoying: if you open a lot of tabs, since each is basically treated as an individual window (if the tab crashes, it is just the one tab that crashes, not the whole application), you will end up using memory like crazy. I can go through a couple hundred MB of RAM in ten seconds if I open a lot of Flash-rich web pages.

You can use Firefox free of charge on your Windows, Mac OS X or Linux-powered machine. The software comes in numerous localized versions (support for over 70 languages).

Pros
Comes free of charge
Plenty of features
Extensive language support
Malware protection
Open video support (play videos with no need to additional plug-ins)
Awesome Bar
Private Browsing Mode
Fast JavaScript Engine
Numerous customization options

Cons
Tab tearing can be annoying at times
Can prove to be resource hungry if you open lots of tabs (but this is a general problem, not limited to Firefox)
No enhanced integration for Flash videos

Mozilla Firefox has been reviewed by George Norman on 09 Sep 2009. Based on the user interface, features and complexity, Findmysoft has rated Mozilla Firefox 5 out of 5 stars, naming it Essential