Textbook of Linux

← Software

Mozilla Firefox

A free and open-source web browser.

Firefox is a web browser developed by the Mozilla Foundation and its commercial subsidiary Mozilla Corporation. It descends from the Netscape browser via the Mozilla Application Suite, and was the first widely successful browser built on the Gecko rendering engine after the original Netscape codebase was abandoned in favour of a complete rewrite in the early 2000s.

Firefox is one of only a handful of browsers that does not depend on Chromium's Blink engine, which makes it important for engine diversity on the web. The Servo project (and its descendants in modern Firefox) brought parallel CSS layout and other Rust-based components into the browser as Project Quantum in 2017, substantially improving performance and security.

Firefox is the default browser on many Linux distributions and is the second-most-used browser overall after Chrome. Mozilla funds it primarily through Google's payment for default-search- engine placement, with the long-term complications that arrangement implies. The browser is MPL-2.0 licensed.

Debian/Ubuntu: sudo apt install firefox
Fedora/RHEL:   sudo dnf install firefox
Arch:          sudo pacman -S firefox
macOS:         brew install --cask firefox