Chapter 14. Firing up Firefox

Chapter 14. Firing up Firefox

In This Chapter

• Introducing Mozilla Firefox

• Discovering what you can do with Firefox

• Setting some preferences and installing plug-ins

Mozilla Firefox is the most advanced and powerful Web browser on the market today. Firefox has pioneered many technologies that other browsers are still trying to catch up with.

This chapter describes many, but not all, of Firefox's basic and advanced capabilities. It also explores how to use and configure Firefox.

If you'd like even more information on using Firefox, check out Firefox For Dummies, by Blake Ross (Wiley Publishing).

Introducing the Firefox Browser

The Internet was a sleepy, quite place back in the early 1990s. Nothing much was going on in that placid place. Nerds and engineers used it to communicate using a fairly novel system called electronic mail, and some file sharing took place. You could also communicate with like-minded individuals using things called bulletin boards and news.

Then something earth-shattering took place. Tim Berners-Lee took a concept he originated back in the 1980s and designed a thing called HyperText Markup Language (HTML). A client and server system was devised to use the protocol, and soon it was possible to view text and, most importantly, graphics from any computer that wanted to provide such a service. The World Wide Web (WWW) was born.

One of the first browsers to find commercial success was the Netscape Navigator browser. Netscape provided its browser free of charge but soon spun off an open source version called Mozilla. Mozilla grew and grew like a monster and became the monster we know as Mozilla Firefox. Firefox is the Linux browser of choice and is distributed with Ubuntu.

Mosaic was one of the original Web browsers. Netscape's internal name for its Navigator browser was Mozilla. The name Mozilla was — in typical technogeekology — a contraction of Mosaic Killer. Killer became killa, and you could make the two into Mos-illa or Mozilla; it didn't hurt that Mozilla sounded like Godzilla. You gotta love technology!