Mozilla Firefox is a free and open source web browser descended from the Mozilla Application Suite and

managed by Mozilla Corporation. Firefox had 21.53% of the recorded usage share of web browsers as of January 2009, making it the second-most popular browser in current use worldwide, after Internet Explorer.[4] 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.[5] 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. Firefox runs on various versions of Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, and many other Unix-like operating systems.

Features
Main article: Features of Mozilla Firefox Features included with Firefox are tabbed browsing, spell checker, incremental find, live bookmarking, an integrated download manager, keyboard shortcuts, and an integrated search system that uses the user's desired search engine.[53] The developers of Firefox aimed to produce a browser that "just surfs the web"[54] and delivers the "best possible browsing experience to the widest possible set of people."[55] The features of Mozilla Firefox distinguish it from other web browsers such as Internet Explorer. It lacks many features found in other browsers, in an effort to combat interface bloat and to allow the browser to be shipped as a small, pared-down core easily customizable to meet individual users' needs. Instead of providing all features in the standard distribution, Firefox relies on the extension system to allow users to modify the browser according to their requirements.

Users can customize Firefox with extensions and themes.Firefox provides an environment for web developers in which they can use builtin tools.

Use in web pages

Main article: Client-side JavaScript See also: Ajax (programming) The primary use of JavaScript is to write functions that are embedded in or included from HTML pages and interact with the Document Object Model (DOM) of the page. Some simple examples of this usage are:

Opening or popping up a new window with programmatic control over the size, position, and attributes of the new window (i.e. whether the menus, toolbars, etc. are visible). Validation of web form input values to make sure that they will be accepted before they are submitted to the server. Changing images as the mouse cursor moves over them: This effect is often used to draw the user's attention to important links displayed as graphical elements.

Because JavaScript code can run locally in a user's browser (rather than on a remote server) it can respond to user actions quickly, making an application feel more responsive. Furthermore, JavaScript code can detect user actions which HTML alone cannot, such as individual keystrokes. Applications such as Gmail take advantage of this: much of the user-interface logic is written in JavaScript, and JavaScript dispatches requests for information (such as the content of an e-mail message) to the server. The wider trend of Ajax programming similarly exploits this strength. A JavaScript engine (also known as JavaScript interpreter or JavaScript implementation) is an interpreter that interprets JavaScript source code and executes the script accordingly. The first ever JavaScript engine was created by Brendan Eich at Netscape Communications Corporation, for the Netscape Navigator web browser. The engine, code-named SpiderMonkey, is implemented in C. It has since been updated (in JavaScript 1.5) to conform to ECMA-262 Edition 3. The Rhino engine, created primarily by Norris Boyd (also at Netscape) is a JavaScript implementation in Java. Rhino, like SpiderMonkey, is ECMA-262 Edition 3 compliant. The most common host environment for JavaScript is by far a web browser. Web browsers typically use the public API to create "host objects" responsible for reflecting the DOM into JavaScript. The web

server is another common application of the engine. A JavaScript webserver would expose host objects representing an HTTP request and response objects, which a JavaScript program could then manipulate to dynamically generate web pages.