- April 5, 2012
- Posted by: essay
- Category: Sample essay papers
I have selected the web-browser Mozilla Firefox as the tangible good product. This free and open source web browser has all the necessary features and works under any operating system.
The recent news articles on this product could be divided for two groups. The first group of articles discusses troubling relationship of Mozilla and Google. One of Mozilla’s top-managemen, Asa Dotzler, recommended Firefox users to leave Google for Microsoft’s search engine Bing. This recommendation appeared after Google CEO Eric Schmidt made some comments on privacy policy. The larger majority of Mozilla’s revenue has always come from Google (about 97 percent), however their contract will expire in 2011.
The second group of news  is about the shop of add-ons for Firefox. Justin Scott, add-ons product manager, told that next year company plans to make the marketplace pilot.
The name “Mozilla FireFox” is a property of Mozilla Foundation. Mozilla foundation was found by Netscape Communications Corporation in 1998 to manage the “first developer release of Communicator 5.0 source code available for free”.
Web address for the home page for this product is www.firefox.com
The design of this web site is rather simple. The color scale is pleasant: light grey-blue background, black and blue fonts. There are not a lot of images. In the upper left is the product’s logo: red fox twisted around blue globe. Just under the logo is a big DOWNLOAD FOR FREE button. In the central part of the main page is the news bar.
Navigating throughout the site menu I found information about the add-ons, another product of Mozilla “Thunderbird”, technical support and community. Thus, on the site all the necessary product information is available without unnecessary images, graphics or texts.
It is important, that almost at oncee I found the beta-version of firefox browser for mobile devices “fennec”.
The home page of Mozilla (www.mozilla.com) is almost the same, though the palette is more bright. On the main page there are three main principles of Mozilla: open source community, global project and public benefit organization.
Web browser is the special software for retrieving, presenting, and traversing information resources on internet.
First web browser appeared in 1991, the competitive war started in 1995 when Microsoft launched the first version of Internet Explorer.
A web browser uses the HTTP protocol to request a text document from a web server. The text document contains special instructions of displaying the document on the user’s screen. The instructions may include hyperlinks to other web pages, position information for images, information about text formatting and color.
As of October 2009 the usage share of different browsers was the following:
Microsoft Internet Explorer ”“ 65%
Mozilla FireFox (any version) 24%
Google Chrome 4%
Apple Safari 4%
Opera 2%.
Mozilla Foundation is “a non-profit organization dedicated to preserving choice and promoting innovation on the Internet”. It accepts donations as the main source of foundation. Also Mozilla gets a great profit from Google as the default search engine in Mozilla FireFox. Â In 2006 the Mozilla Foundation received $66.8 million in revenues.
Approximately US$56.8 million was received due to contract with Google for default searching engine.
At the end of 2008 MF had
total assets for$ 115, 627, 106 (comparing with $99,354,779 in 2007)
total liabilities and net assets $115,627, 106Â ($99,354,779 in 2007)
Net cash provided by operating activities $21,138,539 ($22,926,82 in 2007)
Net cash provided by investing activities $18, 870,712 ($17,396,376 in 2007)
The main competitors of Mozilla Firefox are Google Chrome and Safari. At the second line are Internet Explorer and Opera.
The strengths of Firefox are: good speed, thousands of add-ons and less memory using.
Its main current competitor is new Google Chrome. Its advantages are fast browsing, built-in search feature and task manager. However it is new, so is does not show some site correctly, has a few add-ons available and works under Windows only.
New version of Internet Explorer, 8.0, is a big improvement of this browser. It offers private browsing and now it is more resistant to crashes. However it still uses more resources than other browsers and works slowly.
The latest Opera is fast and lean, it better complies with web standards, runs in all OSs and has version for mobile devices. However it has some troubles in work with java-scripts that is very actual our days.
In 2008, CNET.com selected FireFox as the best browser in their “Battle of the Browsers”. Different browsers – Safari, Chrome, Firefox and Internet Explorer – were compared in terms of performance, security, and features. Firefox became their favorite as well as mine.