14 DAY TRIAL // The name of the new winner on the browser market is Firefox. Since its release in 2004, this browser has been downloaded more than 13 million times and beside that the reviews are excellent, especially because its speed and ease of use.
This success is the result of work of a team in which "the brain" seems to be a 19 years old teenager, Ross Blake and his friends, with whom he worked at Netscape.
After AOL had bought Netscape Communications in 1999 and tried to resurrect Netscape's browser by adding all sorts of bells and whistles, such as advertising and e-mail, Blake started working with David Hyatt, another programmer on a project that became Firefox. After Hyatt left to design Apple Computer Inc.'s Safari Web browser, Mozilla took over the Firefox project. They got help from thousands of people, mostly volunteers like Ross Blake, who examined Firefox's code and prepared version 1.0 for its release Nov. 9. It features a versatile search box, a pop-up blocker, feeds of frequently visited Web pages and the ability to open windows within windows.
The opinion of security experts are extremely favorable and they are recommending the browser because is faster then IE and especially not so vulnerable to viruses, spyware and other malicious programs. According to WebSideStory, which tracks browser use, Firefox was used by 4.6 percent of Web surfers in early January, and that number could reach 10 percent by mid-2005, Internet Explorer has dropped to 90.6 percent this month from 95.5 percent in June.