firefox” width=”229″ height=”221″ align=”right” /> Mozilla Firefox is a free and open source web browser descended from the Mozilla Application Suite, managed by the Mozilla Corporation. Firefox had 19.97% of the recorded usage share of web browsers as of October 2008, making it the second-most popular browser in current use worldwide, after Internet Explorer.

To display web pages, Firefox uses the Gecko layout engine, which implements some current web standards plus a few features which are intended to anticipate likely additions to the standards.

Firefox includes tabbed browsing, a spell checker, incremental find, live bookmarking, a download manager, and an integrated search system that uses the user’s desired search engine. Functions can be added through add-ons created by third-party developers, the most popular of which include the NoScript JavaScript disabling utility, Tab Mix Plus customizer, FoxyTunes media player control toolbar, Adblock Plus ad blocking utility, StumbleUpon (website discovery), DownThemAll! download enhancer and Web Developer toolbar.

Firefox runs on various versions of Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, and many other Unix-like operating systems. Its current stable release is version 3.0.3, released on September 26, 2008. Firefox’s source code is free software, released under a tri-license GPL/LGPL/MPL

Mozilla Firefox 2

Mozilla Firefox 2 is a version of Mozilla Firefox, a web browser released on October 24th 2006 by the Mozilla Corporation.

Firefox 2 uses version 1.8 of the Gecko layout engine for displaying web pages. The release contained many new features not found in Firefox 1.5, including improved support for SVG and JavaScript 1.7, as well as UI changes.

On March 22, 2006, the first alpha version of Firefox 2 (Bon Echo Alpha 1) was released. It featured Gecko 1.8.1 for the first time. Mozilla Firefox 2.0.0.x is the final version supported on Windows NT 4.0 and Windows 98. Mac OS X 10.5 support was added October 18, 2007 with version 2.0.0.8 .

Firefox 2.0 featured updates to tabbed browsing environment, the extensions manager, the GUI, and the find, search and software update engines; a new session restore feature; inline spell checking; and an anti-phishing feature which was implemented by Google as an extension, and later merged into the program itself.

Mozilla is planning on ending support for Firefox 2 mid-December 2008.

Download Firefox 2.x.x

Mozilla Firefox 3

Mozilla Firefox 3 was released on June 17, 2008 by the Mozilla Corporation. Firefox 3 uses version 1.9 of the Mozilla Gecko layout engine for displaying web pages. The new version fixes many bugs, improves standard compliance, and implements new web APIs. Other new features include a redesigned download manager, a new “Places” system for storing bookmarks and history, and separate themes for different operating systems.

Development stretches back to the first Firefox 3 beta (under the codename ‘Gran Paradiso’) which had been released several months earlier on 19 November 2007, and was followed by several more beta releases in spring 2008 culminating in the June release.

Firefox 3 had 2.31% of the recorded usage share of web browsers by June 2008, and had over 8 million unique downloads the day it was released, setting a Guinness World Record.

Download Firefox 3.x.x

Firefox web browser