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 current and ...

, a

web browser A web browser is application software 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 screen. Browsers are used on ...

released on October 24, 2006 by the

Mozilla Corporation The Mozilla Corporation (stylized as moz://a) 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- ...

. 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 throughout the world. They range from . Geckos are ...

layout engine for displaying web pages. 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 image 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 that is one of the core technologies of the World Wide Web, alongside HTML and CSS. As of 2022, 98% of websites use JavaScript on the client side for webpage behavior, often ...

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 fr ...

changes. On March 22, 2006, the first

alpha version A software release life cycle is the sum of the stages of development and maturity for a piece of computer software ranging from its initial development to its eventual release, and including updated versions of the released version to help impro ...

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 NT 4.0 is a major release of the Windows NT operating system developed by Microsoft and oriented towards businesses. It is the direct successor to Windows NT 3.51, which was released to manufacturing on July 31, 1996, and then to retai ...

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. The second operating system in the 9x line, it is the successor to Windows 95, and was released t ...

and

Windows Me Windows Millennium Edition, or Windows Me (marketed with the pronunciation of the pronoun "me"), is an operating system developed by Microsoft as part of its Windows 9x family of Microsoft Windows operating systems. It is the successor to Win ...

, although it can run on

Windows 95 Windows 95 is a consumer-oriented operating system developed by Microsoft as part of its Windows 9x family of operating systems. The first operating system in the 9x family, it is the successor to Windows 3.1x, and was released to manufacturi ...

and

Windows NT 3.51 Windows NT 3.51 is a major release of the Windows NT operating system developed by Microsoft and oriented towards businesses. It is the third version of Windows NT and was released on May 30, 1995, eight months following the release of Windows N ...

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 panels to be contained within a single window, using tabs as a navigational widget for switching between sets of documents. It is an interface ...

environment, the extensions manager, the

GUI The GUI ( "UI" by itself is still usually pronounced . or ), graphical user interface, is a form of user interface that allows users to interact with electronic devices through graphical icons and audio indicator such as primary notation, inst ...

, and the find, search, and software update engines; a new session restore feature; inline

spell checking In software, a spell checker (or spelling checker or spell check) is a software feature that checks for misspellings in a text. Spell-checking features are often embedded in software or services, such as a word processor, email client, electronic di ...

; and an anti-phishing feature which was implemented by

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

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 services provider. It is headquartered in Sunnyvale, California and operated by the namesake company Yahoo! Inc. (2017–present), Yahoo Inc., which is 90% owned by investment funds ma ...

. * 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 feed ...

previewing. *

Bookmark A bookmark is a thin marking tool, commonly made of card, leather, or fabric, used to keep track of a reader's progress in a book and allow the reader to easily return to where the previous reading session ended. Alternate materials for book ...

microsummaries. * Updates to the extension system. * Support for Sherlock and

OpenSearch OpenSearch is a collection of technologies that allow the publishing of search results in a format suitable for syndication and aggregation. Introduced in 2005, it is a way for websites and search engines to publish search results in a standard ...

. * 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 more than) the process that created it. This is achieved in practice by storing the state as data in computer data storage. Programs have t ...

. * 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 web browser for Windows. It was released by Microsoft on October 18, 2006, as the seventh version of Internet Explorer and the successor to Internet Explorer 6. Internet Explorer 7 is par ...

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 various downloadable software and reports news on technology and science topics. Website Softpedia hosts reviews written by its staff—each review in ...

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 for displaying web pages. This version fixes many bugs, improves standard ...

. Within 24 hours after its release, Firefox 3 usage rose from under 1% to over 3% according to

Net Applications Net Applications is a web analytics firm. The company is commonly known in the web browser development and technology news communities for its global market share statistics. History Since 1999, Net Applications is a source of applications for w ...

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. Unlike cross-platform browsers, it uses the native Windows API to create its user interface. K-Meleon can use the secure Goanna layout engine based on Mozilla's ...

, 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 software extension for Mozilla Firefox, SeaMonkey, other Mozilla-based web browsers and Google Chrome, written and maintained by Giorgio Maone, an Italian software developer and member of the Moz ...

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 In product development, an end user (sometimes end-user) is a person who ultimately uses or is intended to ultimately use a product. The end user stands in contrast to users who support or maintain the product, such as sysops, system administrato ...

Mozilla Firefox project page
for developers
Mozilla EULA
* {{web browsers, desktop 2 2006 software Free software programmed in C++ Gopher clients History of web browsers Linux web browsers MacOS web browsers POSIX web browsers Unix Internet software Windows web browsers Software that uses XUL