Mozilla Firefox is a free open source browser available for Windows, Linux, Mac and the Android mobile operating system. The browser development started in 2003 at a time when Internet Explorer dominated the browser landscape. First versions of Firefox, originally titled Phoenix, were released in early 2004. Firefox version 1.0 was released in November 2004 and new versions of the browser were released since then in regular intervals.
Firefox is currently the number three browser in the world market share wise only trailing Microsoft’s Internet Explorer and Google’s Chrome browser which appeared on the scene in 2008.
Mozilla adopted Google’s release scheme by switching to a rapid release schedule in 2011 under which new versions of the browser are released every 42 days. The browser is currently available in four different channels, namely Stable, Beta, Aurora and Nightly. The majority of users are on the stable channel which offers the best stability but is the last to receive new features which are first introduced in Nightly versions of Firefox and then moved to Aurora and Beta releases before they make their way into the stable version of the Internet browser
Below are all Firefox articles, tips and tricks, and reviews that we have published here on Ghacks. You may want to start browsing our Firefox Add-ons reviews or our selection of Firefox Tips.
If you are using the Mozilla Firefox web browser right now to download releases hosted on the project hosting website Github, you will notice that you cannot do so directly anymore. For instance, if you try to download the latest Atom editor builds, you get the warning message. The browser displays a "deceptive site!" warning […]
Mozilla plans to launch a new feature in Firefox soon which will preload autocomplete URLs in the Firefox browser when users type in the address bar. Designed to give the connection to these sites a boost by doing some initial connecting before the user activates those links, some users may prefer to disable this feature […]
Starting with Firefox 55, scheduled for an August 8th, 2017 release, unloaded tab handling in the Firefox web browser got a whole lot better. This should have a positive impact on all Firefox users who restore the last browsing session on start of the browser. It improves the time it takes to load the browser […]
Mozilla plans to upgrade Firefox 32-bit installations to the 64-bit version of the web browser when it releases Firefox 56 later this year. While stable 64-bit versions of the browser have been available for Linux and Mac OS X for a long time, the same cannot be said for the Firefox 64-bit version for Windows. […]
The move from legacy add-ons to WebExtensions introduces a permissions system that is similar to the one used by Google Chrome extensions. WebExtensions may request certain permissions. These are displayed to the user during installation, and are also listed on the add-ons page on the Mozilla website. Add-on authors may integrate new functionality and additional […]
Mozilla has just released Firefox Focus 1.1 for Android. Firefox Focus is a mobile browser that puts the much of its focus on user privacy. The organization released Firefox Focus -- known as Firefox Klar in German speaking countries -- about a month ago for Android. More than one million Android users have downloaded and […]
The WebExtension version of the popular content blocker uBlock Origin has landed on Mozilla's official Add-ons website for the Firefox web browser. A big upcoming shift from legacy add-ons to WebExtensions forces add-on developers to port their legacy add-ons to ensure compatibility with Firefox 57 and newer versions of the browser. Mozilla plans to cut […]
If you follow tech news or my site, you have probably stumbled upon the Firefox uses Google Analytics controversy by now. Let me refresh your memory if you have not. A user of Firefox discovered that Mozilla Firefox connects to Google Analytics when users of the browser load the Get Add-ons page of about:addons. That […]
The Firefox web browser ships with an add-on management interface that users may load directly by typing about:addons in the browser's address bar, or by using menus of the browser the page is linked from. The management interface comes with several pages that separate extensions from themes, plugins, services, scripts and other "add-ons" that users […]
Firefox Nightly users on Windows may configure the web browser to move Web Extensions to their own process in the most recent builds. Mozilla's work on Firefox's multi-process architecture continues. The organization rolled out the new architecture to Firefox Stable this year, and increased the number of multi-process content processes in the recently released Firefox […]
Back in March 2017 and April 2017 we published two articles about Firefox add-ons and the progress that was made towards WebExtensions compatibility. This article is a follow up to those previous articles. It analyzes the situation in July three and two months after we published the initial articles. Mozilla plans to release Firefox 57 […]
If you want to access Firefox about:config preferences directly, you can do so to speed up the editing of preferences, or bookmark them. Firefox's about:config feature, and the underlying structure that powers it, is a mighty feature that is more powerful than that of any other browser out there. While Chrome or Edge come with […]
Mozilla continues its work on Photon, a visual refresh of the Firefox web browser that will be released later this year (most expect it to launch in Firefox 57 out November 2017). You can check out Photon design screenshots here and here, but keep in mind that this is still being worked on and subject […]
URLs List is a free browser extension for Mozilla Firefox that you may use to import plain text lists of URLs in the browser, and to export them. Firefox's session restore feature takes care of the loading of sites that were open in a previous browser session. There is however no option to load a […]
The Firefox add-ons repository, short AMO (Addons Mozilla Org), hosts thousands of add-ons for the Firefox web browser. I like Firefox AMO more than the Google Chrome Web Store, and the core reason for that is that it makes add-on discovery easier. I can sort by newest or updated for instance, something that cannot be […]
Mozilla announced just a moment ago that it has improved the CSS Grid Inspector of Firefox's integrated Developer Tools significantly. The new functionality has been added to Firefox Nightly, the cutting edge development version of the Firefox web browser that gets new features first before they migrate to Beta and then to Stable versions of […]
