Mozilla Firefox 2 is a version of

Firefox Mozilla Firefox, or simply Firefox, is a free and open-source web browser developed by the Mozilla Foundation and its subsidiary, the Mozilla Corporation. It uses the Gecko rendering engine to display web pages, which implements curr ...

, a

web browser A web browser, often shortened to browser, is an application for accessing websites. When a user requests a web page from a particular website, the browser retrieves its files from a web server and then displays the page on the user's scr ...

released on October 24, 2006 by the

Mozilla Corporation The Mozilla Corporation is a wholly owned subsidiary of the Mozilla Foundation that coordinates and integrates the development of Internet-related applications such as the Firefox web browser, by a global community of open-source developers, s ...

. Firefox 2 uses version 1.8 of the

Gecko Geckos are small, mostly carnivorous lizards that have a wide distribution, found on every continent except Antarctica. Belonging to the infraorder Gekkota, geckos are found in warm climates. They range from . Geckos are unique among lizards ...

layout engine for displaying

web page A web page (or webpage) is a World Wide Web, Web document that is accessed in a web browser. A website typically consists of many web pages hyperlink, linked together under a common domain name. The term "web page" is therefore a metaphor of pap ...

s. The release contained many new features not found in Firefox 1.5, including improved support for

Scalable Vector Graphics Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) is an XML-based vector graphics format for defining two-dimensional graphics, having support for interactivity and animation. The SVG specification is an open standard developed by the World Wide Web Consortium sin ...

(SVG) and

JavaScript JavaScript (), often abbreviated as JS, is a programming language and core technology of the World Wide Web, alongside HTML and CSS. Ninety-nine percent of websites use JavaScript on the client side for webpage behavior. Web browsers have ...

1.7, as well as

user interface In the industrial design field of human–computer interaction, a user interface (UI) is the space where interactions between humans and machines occur. The goal of this interaction is to allow effective operation and control of the machine fro ...

changes. On March 22, 2006, the first alpha version of Firefox 2 (Bon Echo Alpha 1) was released. It featured Gecko 1.8.1 for the first time. Mozilla Firefox 2.0.0.20 is the final version to support Windows NT 4.0,

Windows 98 Windows 98 is a consumer-oriented operating system developed by Microsoft as part of its Windows 9x family of Microsoft Windows operating systems. It was the second operating system in the 9x line, as the successor to Windows 95. It was Software ...

and

Windows Me Windows Me (Millennium Edition) is an operating system developed by Microsoft as part of its Windows 9x family of Microsoft Windows operating systems. It was the successor to Windows 98, and was released to manufacturing on June 19, 2000, and t ...

, although it can run on

Windows 95 Windows 95 is a consumer-oriented operating system developed by Microsoft and the first of its Windows 9x family of operating systems, released to manufacturing on July 14, 1995, and generally to retail on August 24, 1995. Windows 95 merged ...

and Windows NT 3.51 using tweaks. Mac OS X 10.5 support was added October 18, 2007 with version 2.0.0.8. Firefox 2.0 featured updates to

tabbed browsing In interface design, a tab is a graphical user interface object that allows multiple documents or Panel (computer software), panels to be contained within a single window (computing), window, using tabs as a navigational widget for switching be ...

environment, the extensions manager, the GUI, and the find, search, and software update engines; a new session restore feature; inline spell checking; and an anti-phishing feature which was implemented by

Google Google LLC (, ) is an American multinational corporation and technology company focusing on online advertising, search engine technology, cloud computing, computer software, quantum computing, e-commerce, consumer electronics, and artificial ...

as an extension, and later merged into the program itself. Mozilla ended support for Firefox 2 on December 18, 2008.

Overview of changes

* Links default to open in a new tab. * Close button on every tab. * Inline spell checking for text boxes. * Session restoration after a browser crash. * Search suggestion for

and

Yahoo! Yahoo (, styled yahoo''!'' in its logo) is an American web portal that provides the search engine Yahoo Search and related services including My Yahoo, Yahoo Mail, Yahoo News, Yahoo Finance, Yahoo Sports, y!entertainment, yahoo!life, and its a ...

. * New search plugin manager and add-on manager. *

Web feed On the World Wide Web, a web feed (or news feed) is a data format used for providing users with frequently updated content. Content distributors ''syndicate'' a web feed, thereby allowing users to ''subscribe'' a channel to it by adding the fee ...

previewing. * Bookmark microsummaries. * Updates to the extension system. * Support for Sherlock and OpenSearch. * Support for SVG text using svg:textPath. * Built-in anti-phishing protection. * Search suggestions appear with search history in the search box for Google and Yahoo!. * Support for client-side session and

persistent storage In computer science, persistence refers to the characteristic of state of a system that outlives (persists for longer than) the process that created it. This is achieved in practice by storing the state as data in computer data storage. Programs ...

. * Improved feed support. * A new NSIS-based installer. * JavaScript 1.7. * Enhanced security and localization support for extensions. * New Winstripe theme refresh: **New navigation icons ** URL bar refresh (New Go button attached to the URL bar) **Search bar refresh Tab bar refresh **Alltabs button (used to view a popup list of all tabs open)

Market adoption & usage of Firefox 2

As one article noted after the release of Firefox 2.0 in October 2006, ''" IE6 had the lion's share of the browser market with 77.22%.

Internet Explorer 7 Windows Internet Explorer 7 (IE7) (codenamed Rincon) is a version of Internet Explorer, a web browser for Windows. It was released by Microsoft on October 18, 2006. It was the first major update to the browser since 2001. It does not support ve ...

had climbed to 3.18%, while Firefox 2.0 was at 0.69%."'' A

Softpedia Softpedia is a software and tech news website based in Romania. It indexes, reviews and hosts downloadable software and reports news on technology and science topics. It is ranked as among of the top download portals on the internet. History So ...

article, however, noted in July 2007 that ''"Firefox 2.0 has been also expanding its share constantly in spite of IE7. From just 0.69% in October 2006, Firefox 2.0 is now accounting for 11.07% of the market. Mozilla has even sacrificed version 1.5 of its open source browser for Firefox 2.0. With support cut at the end of June, Firefox 1.5 dropped to just 2.85%."'' Firefox 2 began to lose notable market share to

Firefox 3 Mozilla Firefox 3.0 is a version of the Firefox web browser released on June 17, 2008, by the Mozilla Corporation. Firefox 3.0 uses version 1.9 of the Gecko (layout engine), Gecko layout engine for displaying web pages. This version fixes many b ...

. Within 24 hours after its release, Firefox 3 usage rose from under 1% to over 3% according to Net Applications in that time period. Firefox 2 market share consistently dropped, eventually being surpassed by Firefox 3 in 2008 and Firefox 3.5 in 2009 in the general browser market as the Firefox version with the greatest share, and by early 2009 had dropped under 3 percent.

Release compatibility

End of Life

Firefox 2.x was end-of-lifed in December, 2008. With roughly 26 months of support, only Firefox 3.6 was supported longer. The Gecko 1.8.1 browser core continued to receive patches for projects such as Camino,

K-Meleon K-Meleon is a free and open-source, lightweight web browser for Microsoft Windows. It uses the native Windows API to create its user interface. Early versions of K-Meleon rendered web pages with Gecko, Mozilla's browser layout engine, which Moz ...

, and

SeaMonkey SeaMonkey is a free and open-source Internet suite. It is the continuation of the former Mozilla Application Suite, based on the same source code, which itself grew out of Netscape Communicator and formed the base of Netscape 6 and Netscape ...

, even after official Firefox releases had ceased. By 2011, the 1.8.1 core had become obsolete, as major websites dropped support for it by employing newer technologies for presentation and complex scripting. The latter can be resource-intensive with the older core, and users stuck with it should use

NoScript NoScript (or NoScript Security Suite) is a free and open-source extension for Firefox- and Chromium-based web browsers, written and maintained by Giorgio Maone, a software developer and member of the Mozilla Security Group. Features Active ...

The latest legacy NoScript version for Firefox 2.0 and SeaMonkey 1.1 is 1.10 to avoid problems with scripts that take too long to process (at the cost of losing some or all site features beyond basic functionality). Services with large user bases have relegated browsers with the Gecko 1.8.1 rendering engine to using lightweight or mobile versions of their sites, alongside recommendations to upgrade the browser; while others only recommend to upgrade. Nevertheless, there is still a very large number of websites that are freely usable and navigable with Firefox 2.0 or equivalents, alone because many of them must still support other older browsers, like Internet Explorer 6 or IE7.

Release history

References

External links

Mozilla Firefox homepage
for end-users
Mozilla Firefox project page
for developers
Mozilla EULA
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