Final Mozilla Firefox 1.0 Released for Mac

The nonprofit Mozilla Foundation announced Tuesday the final release of Firefox 1.0 for Mac with a number of new features and big fixes.

Chris Hofmann, director of engineering for the Mozilla Foundation, told The Mac Observer Firefox is less vulnerable to Internet viruses and spyware than Internet Explorer and includes such features as a pop-up blocker, multiple-window browsing, built-in Google search, RSS integration, and live bookmarks. The group has also fixed what it called a "horde" of bug fixes, including the installation of world writable permissions on Mac OS X.

Mr. Hofmann acknowledged that about one percent of the top Web sites fail to properly download with the new browser, but Firefoxis overall compatibility has improved dramatically over the years.

The release follows up a successful Preview release, which had over eight million downloads.

The foundation recommends users who download the new browser double click on the Firefox 1.0.dmg.dz Disk Image to uncompress and mount it. "Your browser may have already done this for you," download notes said. "Double click the Firefox Disk Image to open it in Finder and drag the Firefox application onto your hard disk. Do not double click the icon in the disk image! Be sure to drag the Firefox application out of the disk image and onto your Hard Disk before running it. Drag the icon to your Dock if you want it to appear there."