ICQ is an instant messaging computer program, owned by Time Warner's AOL subsidiary. ICQ was first developed by the Israeli company Mirabilis. The first version of the program was released in November 1996. The name ICQ is an oronym on the phrase "I seek you".
ICQ features include sending text messages, offline support, multi-user chats, free daily-limited SMS sending, resumable file transfers, greeting cards and multiplayer games. Other features included a searchable user directory and POP3 email support. While many users may benefit from these features, others regard them as "bells and whistles" which tend to clutter the page, and which are weakly organized.
ICQ users are identified by numbers called UIN, distributed in sequential order. As of ICQ 6, users are also able to log in using the specific E-Mail address they associated with their UIN during the registration process. New users are now given a UIN of well over 400,000,000, and low numbers (six or five digits) have been auctioned on eBay by users who signed up in ICQ's early days. Since 2000, ICQ and AIM users are able to add each other to their contact list without the need of any external clients. Otherwise ICQ's Terms of Service do not allow users to communicate with users of other services.
ICQ Pro came about since the emergence of ICQ Lite to differentiate between the two available clients. Though the "Pro" brand has yet to be updated, ICQ versions 4, 5 and 5.1 are in effect updates to the veteran 2003 Pro version, which is commonly considered to be "version 3".
Also available is "ICQ2Go" which is an online, minimalistic version of the fully fledged software, written in Flash, or its older version using Java.
ICQ inc. also developed an alpha version of Compad, an experimental instant messaging client similar to ICQ, though it is not available for worldwide use.
Spinoffs of ICQ included a corporate version for the workplace (named ICQ Groupware), and ICQ Surf, which displayed a list of other ICQ users who also happened to be surfing on the same website as the user. These programs are no longer available.
UIN was coined by Mirabilis, to be used as the name of the so called Universal Internet Number or Unified Identification Number that each user of the ICQ instant messaging software is assigned upon registration. Unlike most other instant messaging programs, in ICQ the only information that is permanent to a registered user is the UIN, although users are able to search for users by their e-mail address, much like MSN, or in fact any other detail that the user made public about himself or herself. The screen name may be changed at will, without having to re-register, as can all other kinds of user information, including e-mail.
As a response to increasing UIN theft or sale of attractive or very short UINs, ICQ started to store email addresses previously associated to a UIN. UINs that are stolen can sometimes be reclaimed. (This only applies if a valid primary email address has been entered into the user profile since 1999.)
ICQ, a short film about ICQ, was directed by Greg McLean, who later wrote Wolf Creek. The film was described by its writer as a mystery/drama, and it concerns a man who while surfing the ICQ network comes across a woman whose acquaintance he could well have done without. The relationship runs the gauntlet of intrigue through to the sinister. It was released in 2001. The short film took out the "Best Director" award in October 2001 at the New York International Independent Film and Video Festival. On return to his home soil in Australia, McLean's film was nominated for Best Sound Design (short film) for the prestigious AFI (Australian Film Institute) awards in 2002.
ICQ also plays an important role in a Polish popular novel Samotno w sieci (Loneliness in the Net) as its main protagonists accidentally find each other in the Internet and, via ICQ, they develop a passionate feeling.
Winamp is a proprietary media player written by Nullsoft, now a subsidiary of Time Warner. It is skinnable, multi-format freeware / shareware.
Winamp was first released by Justin Frankel in 1997. Current Winamp development is credited to Ben Allison (benski), Will Fisher, Taber Buhl, Maksim Tyrtyshny, Chris Edwards and Stephen (Tag) Loomis.
In 2005 Winamp grew from 33 million monthly users to over 57 million monthly users, making it the second most actively used media player globally, second only to Windows Media Player.
The minimalist WinAMP 0.20a was released as freeware on 21 April 1997. Its windowless menubar-only interface showed only play(open), stop, pause, and unpause functions. A file specified on the command line or dropped onto its icon would be played. MP3 decoding was performed by the AMP decoding engine by Tomislav Uzelac, which was free for non-commercial use. The acronym "AMP" stood for "Advanced Multimedia Products". Justin Frankel and Dmitry Boldyrev integrated this engine with their user interface.
WinAMP 0.92 was released as freeware in May 1997. Within the standard Windows frame and menubar, it had the beginnings of the "classic" Winamp GUI: dark gray rectangle with silver 3D-effect transport buttons, a red/green volume slider, time displayed in a green LED font, with trackname, MP3 bitrate and "mixrate" in green. There was no position bar, and a blank space where the spectrum analyzer and waveform analyzer would later appear. Multiple files on the command line or dropped onto its icon were enqueued in the playlist.
Version 1.006 was released June 7, 1997 renamed "Winamp"(lower case). It showed a spectrum analyzer, and color changing volume slider, but no waveform display. The AMP non-commercial license was included in its help menu.
According to Tomislav Uzelac, Frankel licensed the AMP 0.7 engine June 1, 1997 Frankel formally founded Nullsoft, Inc. in January 1998, and continued development of Winamp, which changed from freeware to $10 shareware. In March, Uzelac's newly founded company, PlayMedia Systems sent a cease-and-desist letter to Nullsoft, claiming unlawful use of AMP. Nullsoft responded that they had replaced AMP with Nitrane, Nullsoft's proprietary decoder, but Playmedia disputed this.
Version 1.90, released March 31, 1998 was the first release as a general-purpose audio player, and documented on the winamp.com website as supporting plugins, of which it included two input plugins (MOD and MP3) and a visualization plugin. The installer for Version 1.91, released 18 days later, included wave, cdda, and Windows tray handling plugins, as well as the famous Wesley Willis-inspired DEMO.MP3 file "Winamp, it really whips the llama's ass".
Winamp 2.0 was released on September 8, 1998. The 2.x versions became widely used, and Winamp was one of the most downloaded pieces of software for Microsoft Windows. The new version improved the usability of the playlist, made the equalizer more accurate, introduced more plug-ins and allowed 'skins' for the playlist and equalizer windows.
PlayMedia Systems filed a federal lawsuit against Nullsoft in March 1999. In June, Nullsoft was bought by AOL for $80 million. PlayMedia was granted an injunction on Nullsoft distributing Nitrane, and the same month the lawsuit was settled with out-of-court licensing and confidentiality agreements. Soon after, Nullsoft switched to an ISO decoder from the Fraunhofer Gesellschaft, the developers of the MP3 format.
Winamp 2.10, released March 24, 1999 included a new version of the "Llama" demo.mp3 featuring a musical sting and bleating.
Nullsoft relaunched the Winamp-specific winamp.com in December 1999 to provide easier access to skins, plug-ins, streaming audio, song downloads, forums and developer resources.
As of June 22, 2000 Winamp surpassed 25 million registrants.
The next major Winamp version, Winamp3 (so spelled to include mp3 in the name and to mark its separation from the Winamp 2 codebase), was released on August 9, 2002. It was a complete rewrite of version 2, newly based on the Wasabi application framework, which offered additional functionality and flexibility. Winamp3 was developed parallel to Winamp 2, but many users found it consumed too many system resources and was unstable (or even lacked some valued functionality, such as the ability to count or find the total duration of tracks in a playlist). Winamp3 had no backward compatibility with Winamp 2 skins and plugins, and the SHOUTcast sourcing plugin was not supported. No Winamp3 version of SHOUTcast was ever released.
Many Winamp3 users[attribution needed] reverted to Winamp 2. Nullsoft responded by continuing development of Winamp 2 to versions 2.9 and 2.91. The beta versions 2.92 and 2.95 were released with the inclusion of some upcoming Winamp 5 functionality. During this period the Wasabi cross-platform application framework and skinnable GUI toolkit was derived from parts of the Winamp3 source code. For Linux, Nullsoft released an alpha version of Winamp3 October 9, 2001 but has not updated it despite continued user interest.
The Winamp 2 and Winamp3 branches were later fused into Winamp 5 Nullsoft justified their non-sequential christening by quipping that 2 + 3 = 5 taking the best parts from both applications. They also joked that nobody wants to see a Winamp 4 skin" ('4 skin' being a pun on foreskin). Winamp 5 was based on the Winamp 2 codebase, with several Winamp3 features (e.g. modern skins) incorporated. Winamp 5.0 was released in December 2003. Most of the Wasabi framework built for creating Winamp3 and its components was released as open source, and as of 2005 an active development effort has succeeded in making a standalone version of Wasabi, minus the skinning and scripting modules which were never released.
Winamp 5 comes in three versions. Lite and Full are freeware, and Pro requires registration and (as of October, 2007) sells for US$19.95. The Lite version has far less functionality (largely supplementable with plugins) while still replicating most of Winamp 2's feature set in a far smaller installer. The Full version offers a richer feature set, including music ripping and CD burning at limited speeds (6x for ripping and 2x for burning). The Pro version features unlimited speed music ripping and CD burning and MP3 encoding.
From version 5.2 on, support for synchronizing iPods is built-in.
The latest version is Winamp 5.5: 10th Anniversary Edition, released on October 10, 2007, which marks the tenth year since the first release of Winamp. A beta preview was released on September 10, 2007. New features to the player include album art support, and a unified player and media library interface.
Skins are aesthetic revisions of the graphical user interface of Winamp. Winamp has published documentation on skin creation, and invites contributors to publish skins on Winamp.com. Winamp 5.0 supports "classic" skins designed to Winamp 2 specifications, and "modern" skins per the Winamp3 specification. Modern skins support alpha channels, a docked toolbar, and other innovations to the GUI, but many skin designers[attribution needed] remain committed to the "classic" skin specification. Skin templates, such as those created by Mischa Klement and Jellby, have aided the production of increasingly sophisticated skins. Online communities of skin designers, such as 1001 Winamp Skins and deviantart, and the active forums on Winamp.com attest to the popularity of the feature and its flexibility as a medium for creative expression. As the number of independently produced works has increased, genre styles or categories of skins have emerged. Promoting celebrities, fashion models, films, cars, bands, brands, and other forms of entertainment remains a common staple of the medium. Artists have also created designs for their own sake: parodies of other interfaces, nostalgic emulations of old hardware and operating systems, hand drawn art, 3-dimension renderings employing transparencies, minimalist and high contrast designs, and clever implementations of vector graphics. The size of the development community has led to the inclusion of Winamp skin support in other digital media software such as Windows Media Player and XMMS.
The Winamp software development kit allows software developers to extend Winamp's functionality through the use of plug-ins, which are categorized into the following seven types:
Input plug-ins decode media data contained in specific file formats.
Output plug-ins control the destination of decoded audio (such as the DirectSound device or direct-to-file writing).
Visualization plug-ins provide sound activated graphics.
DSP/Effect plug-ins manipulate audio (reverb, spacialization, equalization, compression, etc).
General Purpose plug-ins add functionality or extensions to Winamp (Media Library, alarm clock, or pause when logged out).
Media Library plug-ins add functionality or extensions to the Media Library plug-in (gen_ml, included with Winamp).
Device plug-ins add support of portable media players to the Portable Media Player plug-in (ml_pmp, included with Winamp)
Easy development of specialized Input plug-ins contributed to Winamp's versatility compared to monolithic media players. For example, popular video game music has driven development of plugins to play back game console music files, such as NSF, USF, GBS, GSF, SID, VGM, SPC, PSF and PSF2.
A wide variety of plug-ins are available on the Winamp web site.
Napster was a file sharing service that paved the way for decentralized P2P file-sharing programs such as Kazaa, Limewire, iMesh, Morpheus, and BearShare, which are now used for many of the same reasons and can download music, pictures, and other files. The popularity and repercussions of the first Napster have made it a legendary icon in the computer and entertainment fields.
Napster's brand and logo continue to be used by a pay service, having been acquired by Roxio.
While Shawn Fanning was attending Northeastern University in Boston, he wanted an easier method of finding music than by searching IRC or Lycos. John Fanning of Hull, Massachusetts, who is Shawn's uncle, struck an agreement which gave Shawn 30% control of the company, with the rest going to his uncle. Napster began to build an office and executive team in San Mateo, California, in September of 1999. Napster was the first of the massively popular peer-to-peer file sharing systems, although it was not fully peer-to-peer since it used central servers to maintain lists of connected systems and the files they provideddirectories, effectivelywhile actual transactions were conducted directly between machines. Although there were already media which facilitated the sharing of files across the Internet, such as IRC, Hotline, and USENET, Napster specialized exclusively in music in the form of MP3 files and presented a user-friendly interface. The result was a system whose popularity generated an enormous selection of music to download.
With the files obtained through Napster, people frequently made their own compilation albums on recordable CDs, without paying any royalties to the copyright holder. As a partial solution to this issue, Napster was used as a test case for the Abilene Network, the educational Internet backbone.
Heavy metal band Metallica discovered that a demo of their song I Disappear had been circulating across the Napster network, even before it was released. This eventually led to the song being played on several radio stations across America and brought to Metallicas attention that their entire back catalogue of studio material was also available. The band responded in 2000 by filing a lawsuit against the service offered by Napster. A month later, rapper Dr. Dre shared a litigator and legal firm with Metallica, and filed a similar lawsuit after Napster wouldn't remove his works from their service, even after he issued a written request. Separately, both Metallica and Dr. Dre later delivered thousands of usernames to Napster who they believed were pirating their songs. Metallica asked their group of users to be banned from the service, while Dr. Dre again asked for his songs to be removed from the service. All users who were on the list of either artist were banned, but a file began circulating soon after the ban took effect that edited the Windows registry and reversed the changes implemented by the ban. Napster complied with Metallica's request, but not Dr. Dre's, and both the suits continued. A whole year had passed since the lawsuits began, Napster settled them both, but this came after being shut down by the Ninth Circuit Court in a separate lawsuit from several major record labels (see below). Also in 2000, Madonna, who had previously met with Napster executives to discuss a possible partnership, became irate when her single "Music" leaked out on to the web and Napster prior to its commercial release, causing widespread media coverage. Verified Napster use peaked with 26.4 million users worldwide in February 2001.
In 2000, A&M records and several other recording companies sued Napster for contributory and vicarious copyright infringement under the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMC Act). The music industry made the following claims against Napster:
(1) That its users were directly infringing the plaintiff's copyright; (2) That Napster was liable for contributory infringement of the plaintiff's copyright; and (3) That Napster was liable for vicarious infringement of the plaintiff's copyright.
The court found against Napster on all three claims.
Napster lost the case in the District Court and appealed to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. Although the Ninth Circuit found that Napster was capable of commercially significant non-infringing uses, it affirmed the District Court's decision. On remand, the District Court ordered Napster to monitor the activities of its network and to block access to infringing material when notified of that material's location. Napster was unable to do this, and so shut down its service in July 2001. Napster finally declared itself bankrupt in 2002 and sold its assets. It had already been offline since the previous year owing to the effect of the court rulings.
Along with the accusations that Napster was hurting the sales of the record industry, there were those who felt just the opposite, that file trading on Napster actually stimulated, rather than hurt, sales. Proof may have come in July 2000 when tracks from English rock band Radiohead's album Kid A found their way to Napster three months before the CD's release. Unlike Madonna, Dr. Dre or Metallica, Radiohead had never hit the top 20 in the US. Furthermore, Kid A was an experimental album without any singles, and received relatively little radio airplay. By the time of the record's release, the album was estimated to have been downloaded for free by millions of people worldwide, and in October 2000 Kid A captured the number one spot on the Billboard 200 sales chart in its debut week. According to Richard Menta of MP3 Newswire, the effect of Napster in this instance was isolated from other elements that could be credited for driving sales, and the album's unexpected success was proof that Napster was a good promotional tool for music.
Since 2000, many musical artists, particularly those not signed to major labels and without access to traditional mass media outlets such as radio and television, have said that Napster and successive Internet file-sharing networks have helped get their music heard, spread word of mouth, and may have improved their sales in the long term. Although some underground musicians and independent labels have expressed support for Napster and the p2p model it popularized, others have criticized the unregulated and extra-legal nature of these networks, and some seek to implement models of Internet promotion in which they can control the distribution of their own music, such as providing free tracks for download or streaming from their official websites, or co-operating with pay services such as Insound, Rhapsody and Apple's iTunes Store.
Napster's facilitation of transfer of copyrighted material raised the ire of the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), which almost immediately in December 1999 filed a lawsuit against the popular service. The service would only get bigger as the trial, meant to shut down Napster, also gave it a great deal of publicity. Soon millions of users, many of them college students, flocked to it.
After a failed appeal to the Ninth Circuit Court, an injunction was issued on March 5, 2001 ordering Napster to prevent the trading of copyrighted music on its network. In July 2001, Napster shut down its entire network in order to comply with the injunction. On September 24, 2001, the case was partially settled. Napster agreed to pay music creators and copyright owners a $26 million settlement for past, unauthorized uses of music, as well as an advance against future licensing royalties of $10 million. In order to pay those fees, Napster attempted to convert their free service to a subscription system. A prototype solution was tested in the spring of 2002: the Napster 3.0 Alpha, using audio fingerprinting technology licensed from Relatable. Napster 3.0 was, according to many former Napster employees, ready to deploy, but it had significant trouble obtaining licenses to distribute major-label music.
On May 17, 2002, Napster announced that its assets would be acquired by German media firm Bertelsmann for $85 million. Pursuant to terms of that agreement, on June 3 Napster filed for Chapter 11 protection under United States bankruptcy laws. On September 3, 2002, an American bankruptcy judge blocked the sale to Bertelsmann and forced Napster to liquidate its assets according to Chapter 7 of the U.S. bankruptcy laws.
After a $2.43 million takeover offer by the Private Media Group, an adult entertainment company, Napster's brand and logos were acquired at bankruptcy auction by the company Roxio, Inc. which used them to rebrand the pressplay music service as Napster 2.0.
Although the central servers used by Napster made it a convenient legal target, the record industry failed to capitalize on the power vacuum
In the 2003 remake of The Italian Job, a flashback depicts Shawn Fanning (playing himself) stealing the program from a computer expert played by Seth Green while the latter is napping, providing a humorous folk etymology for the name.
The suffix "-ster" has become a popular component of the brand names of many Internet products, suggesting a peer-to-peer model, such as Grokster, Aimster (later Madster), and Blubster. This has also been extended to Friendster, a site which vaguely recalls Napster's community-building features.,
An episode of animated television series Futurama, I Dated a Robot, centres on the illegal distribution of robotic celebrity clones over the Internet. The organization responsible for this was thought to be named "Nappster," a reference to Napster. It was later revealed, however, that the full name was "Kidnappster" with a piece of tapestry covering "Kid" from the logo.
In the South Park episode Christian Rock Hard, Stan, Kyle, and Kenny illegally download music from Napster for inspiration for their band 'Moop.' They are then caught by police and shown the horrors music pirating does to musicians. After seeing this, they start a strike and famous musicians/bands join them, among them are Rancid, Master P, Ozzy Osbourne, Meat Loaf (all four also playing in Chef Aid), Blink-182, Horny Toad, Metallica, Britney Spears, Missy Elliott, Alanis Morissette and The Lords of the Underworld (minus Timmy).
In a 2001 episode of the animated Disney series, The Proud Family, Penny becomes addicted to a site named EZ Jackster, a parody of Napster that allows music to be downloaded illegally.
A tribute song to file sharing "Napster and Gnutella" was written to the tune of "Puff, the Magic Dragon" and distributed via OpenNap servers during the lawsuit.
Mozilla Firefox is a web browser project managed by the Mozilla Corporation. Firefox's source code is available under the terms of the Mozilla tri-license as free and open source software. By one measure Firefox has 14.85% of the world's market share in Web browsers as of October 2007, making it the world's second most popular browser.
Features included with Firefox are tabbed browsing, spell checker, incremental find, live bookmarking, an integrated download manager, and a search system that includes Google. A third party developer network has created add-ons which provide specialist functionality. There are more than 2,000 add-ons, with the most popular including FoxyTunes (controls music players), Adblock Plus (ad blocker), StumbleUpon (website discovery), DownThemAll! (download functions) and Web Developer (web tools).
Firefox is cross-platform, providing support for various versions of Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X and Linux. The current stable release of Firefox is version 2.0.0.10, released on 26 November 2007.
Dave Hyatt and Blake Ross began working on the Firefox project as an experimental branch of the Mozilla project. They believed the commercial requirements of Netscape's sponsorship and developer-driven feature creep compromised the utility of the Mozilla browser. To combat what they saw as the Mozilla Suite's software bloat, they created a stand-alone browser, with which they intended to replace the Mozilla Suite. On April 3, 2003, the Mozilla Organization announced that they planned to change their focus from the Mozilla Suite to Firefox and Thunderbird.
The Firefox project has undergone several name changes. Originally titled Phoenix, it was renamed because of trademark issues with Phoenix Technologies. The replacement name, Firebird, provoked an intense response from the Firebird free database software project. In response, the Mozilla Foundation stated that the browser should always bear the name Mozilla Firebird to avoid confusion with the database software. Continuing pressure from the database server's development community forced another change; on February 9, 2004, Mozilla Firebird became Mozilla Firefox (Firefox for short).
The Firefox project went through many versions before 1.0 was released on November 9, 2004. In addition to stability and security fixes, the Mozilla Foundation released its first major update to Firefox version 1.5 on November 29, 2005. On October 24, 2006, Mozilla released Firefox 2. This version includes updates to the tabbed browsing environment, the extensions manager, the GUI, and the find, search and software update engines; a new session restore feature; inline spell checking; and an anti-phishing feature which was implemented by Google as an extension, and later merged into the program itself.
Features included with Firefox are tabbed browsing, spell checker, incremental find, live bookmarking, an integrated download manager, and a search system that includes Google. The developers of Firefox aimed to produce a browser that "just surfs the web" and delivers the "best possible browsing experience to the widest possible set of people."
Users can customize Firefox with extensions and themes. Mozilla maintains an add-on repository at addons.mozilla.org with nearly 2000 add-ons in it as of September 2007.
Firefox provides an environment for web developers in which they can use built-in tools, such as the Error Console or the DOM Inspector, or extensions, such as Firebug.
Mozilla Firefox supports many web standards, including HTML, XML, XHTML, SVG 1.1 (partial), CSS, ECMAScript (JavaScript), DOM, MathML, DTD, XSLT, XPath, and PNG images with alpha transparency. Firefox also supports standards proposals created by the WHATWG such as client-side storage, and canvas element.
Although Firefox 2 does not pass the Acid2 standards-compliance test, development builds of Firefox 3 do.
Firefox uses a sandbox security model, and limits scripts from accessing data from other web sites based on the same origin policy. It uses SSL/TLS to protect communications with web servers using strong cryptography when using the https protocol. It also provides support for web applications to use smartcards for authentication purposes.
The Mozilla Foundation offers a "bug bounty" to researchers who discover severe security holes in Firefox. Official guidelines for handling security vulnerabilities discourage early disclosure of vulnerabilities so as not to give potential attackers an advantage in creating exploits.
Because Firefox has fewer and less severe publicly known unpatched security vulnerabilities than Internet Explorer (see Comparison of web browsers), improved security is often cited as a reason to switch from Internet Explorer to Firefox. The Washington Post reports that exploit code for critical unpatched security vulnerabilities in Internet Explorer was available for 284 days in 2006. In comparison, exploit code for critical security vulnerabilities in Firefox was available for 9 days before Mozilla shipped a patch to remedy the problem.
A 2006 Symantec study showed that although Firefox had surpassed other browsers in the number of vendor-confirmed vulnerabilities that year through September, these vulnerabilities were patched far more quickly than those found in other browsers. Symantec later clarified their statement, saying that Firefox still had fewer security vulnerabilities than Internet Explorer, as counted by security researchers. As of October 25, 2007, Firefox 2 has four security vulnerabilities unpatched, the most severe of which was rated "less critical" by Secunia. Internet Explorer has eight security vulnerabilities unpatched, the most severe of which was rated "highly critical" by Secunia.
Firefox is free and open source software, and is tri-licensed under the Mozilla Public License (MPL), GNU General Public License (GPL), and the GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL). These licenses permit anyone to view, modify and/or redistribute the source code, and several publicly released applications have been built on it; for example, Netscape, Flock and Songbird make use of code from Firefox.
The official end-user builds of Firefox distributed from mozilla.com are licensed under the Mozilla EULA. Several elements do not fall under the scope of the tri-license and have their use restricted by the EULA, including the trademarked Firefox name and artwork, and the proprietary Talkback crash reporter. Because of this and the clickwrap agreement included in the Windows version, the Free Software Foundation (FSF) consider these builds proprietary software.
In the past, Firefox was licensed solely under the MPL, which the FSF criticizes for being weak copyleft; the license permits, in limited ways, proprietary derivative works. Additionally, code under the MPL cannot legally be linked with code under the GPL or the LGPL. To address these concerns, Mozilla re-licensed Firefox under the tri-license scheme of MPL, GPL, and LGPL. Since the re-licensing, developers have been free to choose the license under which they will receive the code, to suit their intended use: GPL or LGPL linking and derivative works when one of those licenses is chosen, or MPL use (including the possibility of proprietary derivative works) if they choose the MPL.
The name "Mozilla Firefox" is a registered trademark; along with the official Firefox logo, it may only be used under certain terms and conditions. Anyone may redistribute the official binaries in unmodified form and use the Firefox name and branding for such distribution, but restrictions are placed on distributions which modify the underlying source code.
To allow distributions of the code without using the official branding, the Firefox source code contains a "branding switch". This switch allows the code to be compiled without the official logo and name, for example to produce a derivative work unencumbered by restrictions on the Firefox trademark (this is also often used for betas and alphas of future Firefox versions). In the unbranded compilation the trademarked logo and name are replaced with a freely distributable generic globe logo and the name of the release series from which the modified version was derived. The name "Deer Park" is used for derivatives of Firefox 1.5, "Bon Echo" for derivatives of Firefox 2.0, and "Gran Paradiso" is used for derivatives of Firefox 3.0.
Outside of certain exceptions made for "community editions", distributing modified versions of Firefox under the "Firefox" name requires explicit approval from Mozilla for the changes made to the underlying code, and requires the use of all of the official branding. For example, it is not permissible to use the name "Firefox" without also using the official logo. When the Debian project decided to stop using the official Firefox logo in 2006 (because of restrictions on its use incompatible with the project's guidelines), they were told by a representative of the Mozilla Foundation that this was not acceptable, and were asked to either comply with the published trademark guidelines or cease using the "Firefox" name in their distribution. Ultimately, Debian switched to branding their modified version of Firefox "Iceweasel".
The rapid adoption of Firefox, 100 million downloads in its first year of availability, followed a series of aggressive marketing campaigns starting in 2004 with a series of events Blake Ross and Asa Dotzler called "marketing weeks".
On September 12, 2004, a marketing portal dubbed "Spread Firefox" (SFX) debuted along with the Firefox Preview Release, creating a centralized space for the discussion of various marketing techniques. The portal enhanced the "Get Firefox" button program, giving users "referrer points" as an incentive. The site lists the top 250 referrers. From time to time, the SFX team or SFX members launch marketing events organized at the Spread Firefox website.
The "World Firefox Day" campaign started on July 15, 2006, the third anniversary of the founding of the Mozilla Foundation, and ran until September 15, 2006. Participants registered themselves and a friend on the website for nomination to have their names displayed on the Firefox Friends Wall, a digital wall that will be displayed at the headquarters of the Mozilla Foundation.
Mozilla Firefox's marketshare has grown for each growth period since inception, mostly at the expense of Internet Explorer. Internet Explorer has seen a steady decline of its usage share since Firefox's release. According to Dutch web analytics firm OneStat, by June 2007, Firefox was the second-most widely used browser, with 12.72% of global usage share. By September 2007, according to data made available by U.S. firm NetApplications, Firefox's market share had grown to 14.88% globally.
Downloads have continued at an increasing rate since Firefox 1.0 was released in November 2004, and as of September 7, 2007 Firefox has been downloaded over 400 million times. This number does not include downloads using software updates or from third-party websites. They do not represent a user count, as one download may be installed on many machines, one person may download the software multiple times or the software may be obtained from a third-party. According to Mozilla employee Asa Dotzler, Firefox had about 110 million users as of August 2007.
Forbes.com called Firefox the best browser in a 2004 commentary piece. PC World named Firefox the "product of the year" in 2005 on their "100 Best Products of 2005" list. After the release of Firefox 2 and Internet Explorer 7 in 2006, PC World reviewed both and declared that Firefox was the better browser. Which? Magazine named Firefox its Best Buy web browser.
Internet Week ran an article in which many readers reported high memory usage in Firefox 1.5. Mozilla developers said the higher memory use of Firefox 1.5 is at least partially an effect of the new fast backwards-and-forwards (FastBack) feature. Other known causes of memory problems are malfunctioning extensions, such as Google Toolbar and some old versions of Adblock, or plug-ins, such as older versions of Adobe Acrobat Reader. When PC Magazine compared memory usage of Firefox, Opera and Internet Explorer, they found that Firefox used approximately as much memory as the other browsers. Tests performed by PC World and Zimbra indicate that Firefox 2 uses less memory than Internet Explorer 7. Firefox 3, in testing of beta 1 version, did not use less memory than version 2, although it still used less memory than Internet Explorer 7.
Like other browsers, Firefox has had a number of vulnerabilities that have affected its security, although according to CERT, not as many as Internet Explorer.
Softpedia notes that Firefox takes longer to start up than other browsers, which was confirmed by browser speed tests. IE 6 also launches slightly faster than Firefox on Microsoft Windows since many of its components are built into Windows and are loaded during system startup. As a workaround for the issue, a preloader application was created that loads components of Firefox on startup, similar to Internet Explorer. A feature of Windows Vista called SuperFetch does a similar task of preloading Firefox if it is used often enough.
The Mozilla Corporation's relationship with Google has been noted in the media, especially with regards to their paid referral agreement with Google. The release of the anti-phishing protection in Firefox 2 especially raised controversy. By default, anti-phishing protection is enabled, based on a list that is updated by downloads to the user's computer about twice an hour from Google's server. The user cannot change the data provider within the GUI, and is not informed who the default data provider is. The browser also sends Google's cookie with each request for update. An additional, explicitly opt-in security feature has been added to recent builds by the Mozilla Foundation. This anti-phishing feature provides live protection by checking each visited URL with Google. Some Internet privacy advocacy groups have expressed concerns surrounding Google's possible uses of this data, though Firefox's privacy policy states that Google may not use personal information for any purposes other than the anti-phishing protection feature.
In 2005, the Mozilla Foundation and Mozilla Corporation had a combined revenue of US$52.9 million, with approximately 95 percent derived from search engine royalties. In 2006, the Mozilla Foundation and Mozilla Corporation had a combined revenue of US$66.9 million, with approximately 90 percent derived from search engine royalties.
Microsoft's head of Australian operations, Steve Vamos, stated in late 2004 that he did not see Firefox as a threat and that there was not significant demand for the feature set of Firefox among Microsoft's users.
Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates has used Firefox, but he has commented "so much software gets downloaded all the time, but do people actually use it?" A Microsoft SEC filing on June 30, 2005 acknowledged that "competitors such as Mozilla offer software that competes with the Internet Explorer Web browsing capabilities of our Windows operating system products."
Despite the cold reception from Microsoft's top management, the Internet Explorer development team does have a healthy relationship with Mozilla. They meet regularly to discuss web standards such as extended validation certificates. In 2005 Mozilla agreed to allow Microsoft to use its RSS logo in the interest of common graphical representation of the RSS feature.
In August 2006, Microsoft offered to help Mozilla integrate Firefox with the then-forthcoming Windows Vista, which Mozilla accepted.
In October 2006, as congratulations for a successful ship of Firefox 2, the Internet Explorer 7 development team sent a cake to Mozilla.
WinZip is a file archiver and compressor for Microsoft Windows, developed by WinZip Computing (formerly Nico Mak Computing). It natively uses the PKZIP format but also has various levels of support for other archive formats.
WinZip was created in the early 1990s as a shareware GUI front-end for PKZIP. Sometime around 1996 the creators of WinZip incorporated compression code from the Info-ZIP project, thus eliminating the need for the PKZIP executable to be present.
From version 6.0 until version 9.0, registered users could download the newest versions of the software, enter their original registration information, and thereby obtain a free upgrade. As of version 10.0 this upgrade scheme was discontinued. WinZip is available in standard and professional versions.
In May 2006, Corel Corporation, known for its WordPerfect and CorelDRAW product lines, announced that it had completed acquisition of WinZip Computing.
WinZip has a 45-day free evaluation period. However, in some versions it continues to work even after this period of time.
WinZip is a compression program for Microsoft Windows. You use it for .zip files, or to make them.
Creation, addition, extraction from ZIP archives.
Configurable Microsoft Windows Shell integration.
128- and 256-bit key AES encryption. This has replaced the less secure PKZIP 2.0 encryption method used in earlier versions. The implementation, using Brian Gladman's code, was FIPS-197 certified, on March 27, 2003.
Version 9 also implemented a 64-bit version of the PKZIP file format, eliminating both the maximum limit of 65,535 members for single archive and the 4-gibibyte size limit on either the archive and each member file.
Support of the bzip2 and PPMd compression algorithms and a special algorithm for audio files (based on WavPack), allowing smaller archives at the cost of a potential increase in compression and extraction times (especially when using PPMd).
Decompression of .bz2 and .rar files.
Support for ARC, ARJ, LHA archives if suitable external programs are installed.
Direct write of ZIP archives to CD/DVD
Automation of backup jobs
Integrated FTP upload
Email ZIP archives
WinZip does not support Unicode characters in filenames. Attempting to add these files to an archive results in the error message "Warning: Could not open for reading: ..."
The ZIP file archive format (PKZIP) was originally invented for MS-DOS in 1989 by Phil Katz and his company PKWare.
Because PKWare did not protect the name by trademark and algorithm of the process by patent, and was slow to realize that the Windows operating systems would eventually dominate the OS market, WinZip Computing Inc. eventually seized the opportunity and released the WinZip application for Microsoft Windows.
iTunes is a digital media player application, introduced by Apple on January 10, 2001 at the Macworld Expo in San Francisco, for playing and organizing digital music and video files. The program is also an interface to manage the contents on Apple's popular iPod digital media players as well as the recently introduced iPhone. Additionally, iTunes can connect to the iTunes Store (provided an internet connection is present) in order to purchase and download digital music, music videos, television shows, iPod games, audiobooks, various podcasts, feature length films, and ringtones.
iTunes is available as a free download for Mac OS X, Windows Vista, and Windows XP from Apple's website. It is also bundled with all Macs, and some HP and Dell computers. Older versions are available for Mac OS 9, OS X 10.0-10.2, and Windows 2000. iTunes is not available for other operating systems, such as Linux.
Users are able to organize their music into playlists within one or more libraries, edit file information, record compact discs, copy files to a digital audio player, purchase music and videos through its built-in music store, download podcasts, back up songs onto a CD or DVD, run a visualizer to display graphical effects in time to the music, and encode music into a number of different audio formats. There is also a large selection of internet radio stations from which to choose.
In addition to static playlist support, iTunes supports 'Smart playlists'. Smart playlists are playlists that can be set to automatically update (live updating, like a database query) based on a customized list of selection criteria. Different criteria can be entered to control many aspects of the playlist.
Playlists can also be published by a user of iTunes with his or her own preferences.
Playlists can be played randomly or sequentially. The "randomness" of the shuffle algorithm can be biased for or against playing multiple tracks from the same album or artists in sequence (a feature introduced in iTunes 5.0). Party Shuffle can also be biased towards selecting tracks with a higher star rating. With this bias enabled, each star rating increases the preference for that particular song about 4% over that of a one-star-less rated song. Unrated songs are the least likely to be played. Inter-star ratings are stored by iTunes, but only affect this feature in the range of zero to one star.
The Party Shuffle playlist is intended as a simple DJ'ing aid. By default, it selects tracks randomly from other playlists or the library; users can override the automatic selections by deleting tracks (iTunes will choose new ones to replace them) or by adding their own via drag-and-drop or contextual menu. This allows a mixture of both preselected and random tracks in the same meta-playlist. The playlist from which Party Shuffle draws can be changed on the fly; this will cause all randomly chosen tracks to disappear and be replaced.
iTunes keeps track of songs by creating a virtual library, allowing users to access and edit a song's attributes. These attributes, known as metadata, are stored in two library files.
The first is a binary file called iTunes Library and it uses a proprietary file format. It caches information like artist and genre from the audio format's tag capabilities (the ID3 tag, for example) and stores iTunes-specific information like play count and rating. iTunes typically reads library data only from this file.
The second file, iTunes Music Library.xml, is refreshed whenever information in iTunes is changed. It uses an XML format, allowing developers to easily write applications that can access the library information (including play count, last played date, and rating, which are not standard fields in the ID3v2.3 format). Apple's own iDVD, iMovie, and iPhoto, and Freshly Squeezed Software's Rock Star are examples of applications that access the library.
If the first file is corrupted, iTunes will attempt to reconstruct it from the XML file. Detailed third-party instructions regarding this are documented elsewhere.
For MP3 files, iTunes writes tags in Unicode ID3v2.2 by default, but converting them to ID3v2.3 and ID3v2.4 is possible via its "Advanced" > "Convert ID3 Tags" toolbar menu. If both ID3v2.x and ID3v1.x tags are in a file, iTunes ignores the ID3v1.x tags.
AAC and Apple Lossless files support Unicode metadata, stored in the MP4 container as so-called "Atoms". iTunes can play Vorbis or FLAC if the required QuickTime plugins are installed.
iTunes allows people to rip from CDs. However, it does not have support for analog line-in recording which would allow users to rip from audio cassettes, however since many people have switched from audio cassettes to their CD equivalents, it is not a drawback to most users.
To compensate for the lack of a physical CD, iTunes can print custom-made jewel case inserts as well as song lists and album lists. After burning a CD from a playlist, one can select that playlist and bring up a dialogue box with several print options. The user can choose to print either a single album cover (for purchased iTunes albums) or a compilation cover (for user-created playlists). iTunes then automatically sets up a template with art on one side and track titles on the other.
An iMix is a user-created playlist published in the iTunes Store. iMixes were first introduced in iTunes version 4.5. Anyone can create an iMix free of charge. iMixes are limited to 100 songs and must feature content available on the iTunes Store. iMixes are public and searchable by any iTunes user. Users may also rate any iMix using a five-star system. iMixes are active for one year from their original published date. Users can publish their iTunes iMix to their blog, profile page or website.
iTunes 1.0 came with support for the Kerbango Internet radio tuner service, giving iTunes users a selection of some of the more popular online radio streams available. When Kerbango went out of business in 2001, Apple created its own Web radio service for use with iTunes 2.0 and later. As of February 2006, the iTunes radio service features around 300-400 distinct "radio stations" (with a total of over 700 streams, allowing for multiple bit rates), mostly in MP3 streaming format. Programming covers many genres of music and talk, including streams from both internet-only sources as well as streamed traditional stations. iTunes also supports the .pls and .m3u stream file formats used by Winamp, enabling iTunes to access almost any stream using that format.
Since the release of iTunes 7, Apple no longer promotes the Internet radio feature, and there is no mention of it appearing on the iTunes website. However, it remains in the QuickTime 7.0.4, and iTunes EULA used by iTunes 6.0.5.20. With iTunes 7, the "Radio" item has reappeared as an optional source in the preferences, along with its stations.
iTunes 7 can currently read, write, and convert between MP3, AIFF, WAV, MPEG-4, AAC, and Apple Lossless.
iTunes can also play any audio files that QuickTime can play (as well as some video formats), including Protected AAC files from the iTunes Store and Audible.com audio books. In order to play other formats such as the Ogg-contained Vorbis or Speex codecs, iTunes requires the Xiph QuickTime Components to be installed. iTunes currently will not play back HE-AAC/aacPlus audio streams correctly. HE-AAC/aacPlus format files will play back as 22 kHz AAC files (effectively having no high end over 11 kHz). HE-AAC streaming audio (which a number of Internet Radio stations use) will not play back at all.
There has been some criticism of the quality of Apple's MP3 encoder, with regards to variable bitrate encoding. In a January 2004 double-blind public participated in a codec listening test of six MP3 encoders encoding at 128 kbit/s, conducted by Roberto Amorim, and the iTunes MP3 VBR encoder came last. The author has later acknowledged that there may have been serious issues with how iTunes was tested.
The Windows version of iTunes can automatically convert DRM-free WMA (including version 9) files to other audio formats, but it does not support direct playback or encoding of DRM protected WMA files. Telestream, Inc. provides free codecs for Mac users of QuickTime to enable playback of unprotected Windows Media files. These codecs are recommended by Microsoft.
iTunes includes sound processing features, such as equalization, "sound enhancement" ("sound improvement" in some languages) and crossfade. There is also a feature called "Sound Check" which automatically adjusts the playback volume of all songs to the same level. Like "sound enhancement", this can be turned on in the 'Playback' section of iTunes' preferences.
iTunes Library can be shared over a local network using the closed, proprietary Digital Audio Access Protocol (DAAP), created by Apple for this purpose. DAAP relies on the Bonjour network service discovery framework, Apple's implementation of the Zeroconf open network standard. Apple has not made the DAAP specification available to the general public, only to third-party licensees such as Roku. However, the protocol has been reverse-engineered and is now used to stream playlists from non-Apple software (mainly on the Linux platform).
DAAP allows shared lists of songs within the same subnet to be automatically detected. When a song is shared, iTunes can stream the song but won't save it on the local hard drive, in order to prevent unauthorized copying. Songs in Protected AAC format can also be accessed but authentication is required. A maximum of five users may connect to a single user every 24 hours.
Originally with iTunes 4.0, users could freely access shared music anywhere over the Internet, in addition to one's own subnet, by specifying IP addresses of remote shared song libraries. Apple quickly removed this feature with version 4.0.1, claiming that users were violating the End User License Agreement.
With the release of iTunes 7.0, Apple changed their implementation of DAAP. This change prevents any third-party client, such as a computer running Linux, a modified Xbox, or any computer without iTunes installed, from connecting to a remote iTunes repository. iTunes will still connect as a client to other iTunes servers and to third-party servers.
On May 9, 2005, video support was introduced to iTunes with the release of iTunes 4.8. Users can drag and drop movie clips from the computer into the iTunes Library for cataloging and organization. They can be viewed in a small frame in the main iTunes display, in a separate window, or fullscreen. Before version 7 provided separate libraries for media types, videos were only distinguished from audio in the Library by a small icon resembling a TV screen and grouped with music in the library, organized by the same musical categories (such as "album" and "composer"). iTunes relies on QuickTime and is therefore incompatible with some common video formats, including WMV.
On October 12, 2005, Apple introduced iTunes 6.0, which added support for purchasing and viewing of video content from the iTunes Music Store. The iTunes Music Store initially offered a selection of several thousand Music Videos and five TV shows including most notably the ABC network's Lost and Desperate Housewives. Disney Channel's shows were also offered (The Suite Life of Zack and Cody and That's So Raven) 24 hours after airing as well as episode packs from past seasons; since that time, the collection has expanded with content from numerous television networks. The iTunes Music Store also gives the ability to view Apple's large collection of movie trailers.
As of September 5, 2007, the iTunes Store offers over 550 television shows for download. Additionally, a catalog of 75 feature-length movies from Disney-owned studios was introduced. As of April 11, 2007, over 500 feature-length movies are available through iTunes.
Originally, movies and TV shows were only available to U.S. customers, with the only video content available to non-U.S. customers being music videos and Pixar's short films. TV shows have now been made available to UK customers on August 29, 2007.
Video content available from the store used to be encoded as 540 kbit/s Protected MPEG-4 video (H.264) with an approximately 128 kbit/s AAC audio track. Many videos and video podcasts currently require the latest version of QuickTime, QuickTime 7, which is incompatible with older versions of Mac OS (only v10.3.9 and later are supported). On September 12, 2006, the resolution of video content sold on the iTunes Store was increased from 320x240 (QVGA) to 640x480 (VGA). The higher resolution video content is encoded as 1.5 Mbit/s(minimum) Protected MPEG-4 video (H.264) with a min. 128 kbit/s AAC audio track.
As of 1st October there are a little fewer than 1000 films from major films studios on iTunes and 74 independent film according to Apple.
iTunes supports visualizer plugins and device plugins. Visualizer plugins allow developers to create music-driven visual displays. The visualizer plug-in software development kits for Mac and Windows can be downloaded for free from Apple. Device plugins allow support for additional music player devices, but Apple will only license the APIs to bona fide OEMs who sign a non-disclosure agreement.
Version 4.9 of iTunes, released on June 28, 2005, added built-in support for podcasting. It allows users to subscribe to podcasts in the iTunes Music Store or by entering the RSS feed URL. Once subscribed, the podcast will be downloaded automatically. Users can choose to update podcasts weekly, daily, hourly, or manually.
Users can select podcasts to listen to from the Podcast Directory, to which anyone can submit their podcast for placement. In this directory, Apple maintains four "official" podcasts: Podfinder (with Adam Curry), Street Official Real Talk (interviews with hip-hop artists), iTunes New Music Tuesday, and Apple Quarterly Earnings Call. The front page of the directory also displays high-profile podcasts from commercial broadcasters and independent podcasters. It also allows users to browse the podcasts by category or popularity.
The addition of podcasting functionality to a mainstream audio application like iTunes greatly helped bring podcasting to a much wider audience. Within days after iTunes 4.9 was released, podcasters were reporting that the number of downloads of their audio files had tripled, sometimes even quadrupled.