Mozilla Firefox

Analysis and Evaluation

Adoption

 
Our May 2005 snapshot of browser access logs for cougars' den and webmail, show that between 8-9% of our constituents use Firefox to access these services.   Our extended community, accessing www.apu.edu with firefox was a bit lower at 5%.

The industry is showing a steady increase in marketshare from Firefox.  WebSideStory's report through April shows firefox going from 4% to 7% in the last year, while IE, Netscape & original Mozilla decreased. [1]  A report in June showed that Firefox increased its market share to 8.71%, up from 8% in May, while Internet Explorer's share shrank to 86.56% from 87.23%, according to NetApplications.com. Since the beginning of the year, Firefox has increased its market share every month between 0.5% and 1% [2]. It is  expected to hit 10% marketshare soon.  In certain segments such as computer professionals the usage rate is higher.  A recent study published that Firefox Used By 1 Out 10 Business Professionals, and it was reported that IBM is pushing firefox in house.

Application Future

 
Firefox has been growing in popularity.  Innovative features such as tabbed browsing, lean design, and the promise of increased security are perhaps the cause of those switching from Internet Explorer. Firefox represents a complete re-write of the historical mozilla/netscape browser, and comes 5 years after Netscape open sourced its Netscape Navigator product.

The Mozilla Foundation "exists to provide organizational, legal, and financial support for the Mozilla open-source software project. The Foundation has been incorporated as a California not-for-profit corporation to ensure that the Mozilla project continues to exist beyond the participation of individual volunteers, to enable contributions of intellectual property and funds and to provide a vehicle for limiting legal exposure while participating in open-source software projects."

Mozilla, maintains a roadmap for Firefox, with the goal of continuing to build a "best of breed" browser product for Windows, Linux and Mac OS X.  Firefox's next major release, Firefox 1.5, is currently in beta, and scheduled for release in very soon.  Significant improvements include: automated updates, faster browser navigation, drag and drop re-ordering of tabs, improved pop up blocking, the ability to easily clear private data, and most importantly new support for Web Standards.

Security

 

Firefox perhaps has not been a large target for hackers because of its low marketshare.  This may be changing, since 21 vulnerabilities were noted on the last Symantic report.  However, the mozilla community has been able to respond very quickly to issues as they are found, which according to our criteria, is the most important factor besides design.  Architecturally, Firefox does not use VBScript, ActiveX controls or other extensions granting greater access to the host operating system.

From a user security perspective, Firefox was one of the first to have built in pop-up blocking.  Another helpful awareness feature, is that when you visit a secure (SSL) site with Firefox, the URL is high-lighted in yellow to help prevent phishing attacks.  Users are notified when updates are available, but the messages can easily be ignored.  In the next release of Firefox (1.5), these will be much more prevalent, and allow for incremental patching.  This will make it easier to release security patches without requiring full downloads of new releases.

Some security experts have noted that user-added firefox extensions could expose security problems if they are written poorly.

Standards Compliance

 
Firefox holds a high commitment to W3C standards, with a proven track record toward early adoption of emerging standards.  It is arguably the most standards compliant browser available.[3]  Firefox 1.5 will support an impressive list of open standards including SVG, CSS 2 and CSS 3(partial), and JavaScript 1.6.[4]

Also of note, are the tools available for firefox which assist with standards-based web development including: DOM Inspector, a tool which allows inspection and modification of document without having to edit the document directly;  JavaScript console, a tool to write and test JavaScript code as well as view JavaScript and CSS errors on a page;   View page source, with syntax highlighting and find features; Browser extensions including the Web Developer toolbar, Live HTTP Headers, HTML Validator and many more.  These tools not only help with the development of web pages for rendering in firefox, but in any current or future standards compliant web browser.  Perhaps this is partially why it has found such success among IT professionals. 

Supportability

 
Firefox is easy to download and install (its under 5 Megabytes).  A multitude of extensions (currently close to 700) are available, and the most commonly used plug-ins such as Macromedia Flash are available.  Extensions are small add-ons that add new functionality to Firefox. They can add anything from a toolbar button to a completely new feature.  The user is able to easily check for new versions of the browser and installed extensions.

In areas of performance, firefox renders pages faster than most browsers, and its load time is drastically increased from the mozilla suite and netscape products.  The browser is stable, probably a result of bugs being fixed with frequent releases.  In theory, some poorly written extensions not officially supported by mozilla could raise stability concerns.

Firefox is quite easy to use, and its simple uncluttered interface has caused other browsers to follow suit.  Usability features such as tabbed browsing are often noted as one of the primary reasons to switch.  With the 1.5 release, Firefox will have improved compliance to Human Interface Guidlines.[5]  Firefox has built in illustrated help with topics such as: nagivation, searching, efficiency, preferences, controlling popups, keyboard & mouse shortcuts, a menu reference and help for Internet Explorer users.

Further support can be received from the mozilla.org community forums, knowledge base, or internet relay chat.  The published frequently asked questions are geared for average users and are easy to understand.  Convenient links are also available for plugins as well.  Telephone support is available from a third party (InfoSpan), for $39.95 per incident.  The wealth of information provided by the community, and opportunites to interact at the developer, administrator or user level, would provide more than adequate assistance should any problems arise.

It should also be noted, that because Firefox runs the same on both Windows and Mac OS X (and Linux), it is improves the supportability of the application.  The support desk does not need to have a macintosh computer in front of them in order to walk someone through a step over the phone.  This is a great advantage of any cross-platform application.

 

1. http://www.websidestory.com/products/web-analytics/datainsights/spotlight/05-10-2005.html 

2. http://www.computerworld.com/softwaretopics/software/story/0,10801,103212,00.html 

3. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_web_browsers#Web_technology_support 

4. http://developer.mozilla.org/en/docs/Firefox_1.5_Beta_for_Developers#Support_for_open_Web_standards 

5. http://www.hcibib.org/hci-sites/GUIDELINES.html