Just more than 10 years ago, Mozilla threw its open-source cipher into the public domain. Today, its browser — Firefox — is preparing to launch its third major release in hopes of continuing to eat away at Microsoft’s World Wide Web Explorer.

Firefox already has more than 18 percent of the global market, according to Net Applications. With the release of Firefox 3, Mozilla could see a boost in downloads and market share. Microsoft’s next version of Net Explorer won’t come to market until later that year.

On June 17, Mozilla will release Firefox 3. After more than 34 months of active development and the contributions of thousands of citizens, Firefox 3 will be downloadable free from the Mozilla Web site. Mozilla is promising that is the best browser — period.

“Firefox 3 is a very nice browser. It’s still going to have to go up against Web Explorer {Windows] and Safari [Mac], which have the home court advantage on their operating systems,” said Michael Gartenberg, an analyst at

JupiterResearch. “It shows that the browser market is anything but stagnant.”

A Focus on protection

Firefox 3 is based on the Gecko 1.9 Web rendering platform. Building on the previous release, Gecko 1.9 has more than 15,000 updates, including some major re-architecting for improved performance, stability, rendering correctness, and cipher simplification and sustainability. The outcome, Mozilla said, is a more secure, easier to use, more personal product with a lot more under the hood to offer Web-site and Firefox add-on developers.

Mozilla begins with a focus on shield. Users can visit a Web site’s favicon [icon] in the location bar to see who owns the site and to check whether the connection is secure. Identity verification is prominently displayed and easier to understand, Mozilla said. When a site uses Extended Validation (EV) SSL certificates, the site’s favicon will…

Original post by Chase Higgins

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