Holiday

Although Youngman's jest suggests that the list of holidays for a non-believer would necessarily be the "empty set", many non-believers honor various holidays and "holy" days, and those of one faith often honor holidays of other faiths. However, according to a Microsoft SEC Filing on June 30, 2005, it acknowledged that browsers such as Mozilla are competitive threats to Internet Explorer: "Competitors such as Mozilla offer software that competes with the Internet Explorer Web browsing capabilities of our Windows operating system products."^[36]. Referring to the original meaning of the term, Henny Youngman included this joke among his vast catalog of one-liners:. Vamos stated that he himself never used it personally.^[34] Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates has used Firefox, but he has commented that "so much software gets downloaded all the time, but do people actually use it?"^[35]. Christopher Columbus, who has arrived in the New World just moments earlier, tells a Native American that he wants to cash a check... Despite Firefox's apparent gains on Internet Explorer, Microsoft head of Australian operations, Steve Vamos, stated that he did not see Firefox as a threat and that there was not significant demand for the featureset of Firefox amongst Microsoft's users. One example of this fact is revealed by the assumption inherent in this bit of dialogue from the 1961 musical-comedy album, Stan Freberg Presents The United States of America, Volume One. There is even interest in the Pocket PC community about having Firefox as an option for web browsing.

Some holidays that were once widely celebrated are less so today, for various reasons. A number of applications are already using Portable Firefox Live to deliver a browser and HTML-based content from CD. Some are designed to promote a cause, others recognize historical events not recognized officially, and others are "funny" holidays are generally intended as humorous distractions and excuses to share laughs among friends. Haller has also started development work on Portable Firefox Live, which aims to run on CD-R or other read-only media. These are holidays celebrated by various groups and individuals. It also uses compression (courtesy of UPX and 7-Zip) to reduce the overall footprint and increase speed. Other secular holidays not observed internationally:. It includes a specialized launcher that adjusts extensions and themes to work as they are moved from computer to computer.

Many other days are marked to celebrate events or people, but are not strictly holidays as time off work is rarely given. Haller released the first packaged version and then led development from there. They are:. John T. With the winter holidays, come various different greetings appropriate for each holiday or the entire season. It arose out of a mozillaZine thread in June of 2004. In some Christian countries, the end of the festive season is considered to be after the feast of Epiphany, although this has only symbolic value. Portable Firefox is a repackaged version of Firefox designed to run from a USB flash drive, iPod, external hard drive or any other portable media.

Usually, this festive period begins near the end of November and ends with New Year's Day on January 1, reflecting traditional pagan celebrations of the period around the winter solstice in the northern hemisphere. And a start-up, Flock (formerly Round Two, MozSource and more formerly E-Flo), plans to build enhancements for Firefox.^[33] Firefox is also used by the 3B browser, which browses the web as a 3D city of web sites or a 3D store. Except in North America, the phrases "holiday season" and "holiday period" usually mean the summer months when most people take their annual holiday ("vacation" in North American English), and phrases such as the "festive period" are used to describe the period around Christmas and New Year. The current version of Netscape, known as Netscape Browser or Netscape 8, combines the functionalities of Firefox and Internet Explorer. In many Western countries, the winter holiday season is a period of time surrounding Christmas. A number of commercialized versions of the Firefox browser have developed outside the not-for-profit Mozilla Foundation. The Catholic fiestas patronales are celebrated in each place's patron saint's day, according to the Calendar of saints. Google released two new Google Extensions for Firefox on December 14, 2005, further affirming the company's interest in Firefox.

In the order of the Wheel of the Year:. Search engine companies including Google, Yahoo! and A9.com now also offer Firefox extensions for accessing their services, in addition to their original Internet-Explorer add-ons. Well-known consecutive holidays include:. also recommends Firefox as the browser for its Blogger.com weblog service.^[31] On May 18, 2005, eBay announced support for Firefox for its eBay Picture Manager.^[32]. In late 1990s, the Japanese government passed a law that increased the likelihood of consecutive holidays by moving holidays from fixed days to a relative position in a month, such as the second Monday. (Link prefetching involves a standards-compliant optimization technique that utilizes the browser's idle time to download or prefetch documents that the user might visit in the near future.) Google, Inc. They tend to be considered a good chance to take short trips. Since March 30, 2005, the Google search engine has utilized the link prefetching feature of Firefox for faster searching.

Consecutive holidays are a string of holidays taken together without working days in between. Since the pre-1.0 stages, a number of well-known websites and web applications, including Gmail, have supported (and in some cases, required) the use of Firefox. "Legal holiday" is not a term used outside the United States. ^[30]. "Public Holiday" is the term used in Australia and "Bank Holiday" in the UK, although some industries in the UK work through Bank Holidays. In December 2005, it was announced that Dell UK were to start shipping the Firefox browser pre-installed on their PCs. Public holidays can be either religious, in which case they reflect the dominant religion in a country, or secular, in which case they are usually political or historical in character. The Networking Services and Information Technology department of the University of Chicago started to include both Firefox and Thunderbird in its connectivity package for all incoming students on the third quarter of 2005.^[29].

A public holiday or legal holiday is a holiday endorsed by the state. IBM encourages its employees to use Firefox as the company's standard web browser, with support from the company's help desk staff. . According to a CNET article published on May 12, 2005, about 30,000 of IBM's staff (about 10% of the total) already use Firefox.
. Those companies remained reluctant to publicize the migration, due to in-house concerns that this might damage their relationship with Microsoft.^[28]. A holiday can also be a special day on which school and/or offices are closed, such as Labor Day. During the FOSDEM 2005 conference, Tristan Nitot, the president of Mozilla Europe, said that he knew "a few companies" that had deployed the Firefox browser or the Thunderbird mail client across a million seats.

In Canada and the United States, a Holiday is a day set aside by a nation or culture (in some cases, multiple nations and cultures) typically for celebration but sometimes for some other kind of special culture-wide (or national) observation or activity. From time to time, the SFX team or SFX members launch marketing events organized at the Spread Firefox website. However, some Canadians (especially those of English or Irish decent) will use both the terms vacation and holiday interchangeably when referring to a trip away from home or time off work. The site lists the top 250 referrers. "I'm going on holiday to Malta next week"), the North American equivalent being "vacation". The portal enhanced the "Get Firefox" button program, giving users "referrer points" as an incentive. In most of the English-speaking world a holiday is also a period spent away from home or business in travel or recreation (e.g. On September 14, 2004, a community-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 word has evolved in general usage to mean any special day. For example, Blake Ross and Asa Dotzler organized a series of events dubbed "marketing week". Based on the words holy and day -, holidays originally represented special religious days. The rapid adoption of Firefox apparently accelerated in part due to a series of aggressive community-marketing campaigns since 2004. The word holiday has related but different meanings in English-speaking countries. It should be noted that a download count is not a user count, as a single download can be installed over many machines, or one person can download the software multiple times. Native: "Columbus Day!". The download counter is available as an RSS feed, so that the Firefox download can be added on websites to keep track of the number of downloads in near-realtime.

Columbus: "Oh? Why?". These download counts did not include downloads using software updates and downloads from third-party websites. Banks closed.". None of the Mozilla Foundation's previous product releases experienced that kind of growth. Native: "You out of luck today. In other words, the download rate remained fairly stable. Tax Freedom Day (calculated by dividing the tally of all taxes collected in each year by a tally of all income, and applying it to the calendar). Cumulative downloads increased in a near-linear fashion during the first quarter of 2005.

Sinkie Day (The Day After Thanksgiving). Europe, according to a study released by the firm XiTi on 2006-01-08, generally had higher percentages of Firefox use, with an average of 20%. Flying Spaghetti Monsterism Holy Day (every Friday). According to several sources (as listed in statistics reference), by November 2005, Firefox had around 9.4% of global market share, and 10% for North America. Blame Someone Else Day (first Friday the 13th of the year). Web-surfers have adopted Firefox rapidly, despite the dominance of Internet Explorer in the browser market. Christmahanukwanzakah (the holiday season in general, a holiday made out of a marketing campaign invented by Virgin Mobile during the 2004 holiday season.). This is rarely a Firefox-specific problem, and is usually caused by the respective websites using code that does not adhere to W3C standards—such as code specific to Internet Explorer's quirks—or utilizing ActiveX controls or VBScript scripts, which are not supported in Firefox.

Festivus (23 December). Users switching from Internet Explorer sometimes find that certain websites do not render as expected in Firefox. Mole Day (23 October). ^[27] Another known frequent cause of memory leaks is misbehaving extensions, most notably Adblock. Brick Day (15 October). This has been reported as memory leaks ^[26]; Mozilla developers claim it is sometimes at least partially an effect of blazing fast backwards and forwards (FastBack) feature. October Fool's Day (1 October) (Southern Hemisphere version of April Fool's Day). Another mentioned criticism is that a small percentage of users complain of Firefox using much more memory than other browsers.

Ask a Stupid Question Day (28 September). IE also launches faster than Firefox on Windows as some of its components are loaded at Windows startup. International Talk Like a Pirate Day (19 September). Other Gecko-based browsers such as K-Meleon, which use platform-native user interface implementations, generally run faster than Firefox. National Underwear Day (11 August). The non-Windows-native XUL implementation of the user interface may be the cause of this perceived delay. National Talk In Elevators Day (last Friday of July). Some note that Firefox takes longer to launch than other browsers such as Internet Explorer or Opera on Windows.

Pi Approximation Day (22 July). This difference of opinion was one of the motivating factors behind the development of the Flock browser, which is a Firefox fork. Evoloterra (20 July celebrates the first manned Moon Landing). However, not all users wish to install extensions for the features they want, preferring to see them included in the official software package. X-Day (5 July in the Church of the SubGenius). (The developers state in response that they intend for Firefox to be a fairly minimal browser in order to reduce software bloat and bugs, while retaining a high degree of extensibility.) Most of these features, and many others, exist as installable Firefox extensions, or third-party software. Bloomsday (16 June based on James Joyce's novel Ulysses). Many users observe that the developers have not implemented frequently requested features.

No Pants Day (first Friday of May). Firefox has at times attracted criticism for lacking features found in some other browsers. 24-hour Comics Day (24 April). No publicly known attacks since its launch have been discovered. Towel Day (25 May) (a tribute to the late Douglas Adams). Another security source, SecurityFocus, reports no known vulnerabilities in Firefox 1.5.0.1, versus 65 unpatched vulnerabilities in Internet Explorer 6 on Microsoft Windows XP SP2. International Cannabis Day (20 April). As of February 2006, Secunia has reported 2 unpatched vulnerabilities in Firefox 1.x (with the most serious one marked "less critical"), versus 21 for Internet Explorer (with the most serious one marked "highly critical").

Pi Day (14 March). While similar to other "responsible disclosure" policies operated by software vendors such as Microsoft, this policy falls short of the full disclosure principle favored by some security researchers. International Dadaism Month (4 February, 1 April, 28 March, 15 July, 2 August, 7 August, 16 August, 26 August, 18 September, 22 September, 1 October, 17 October, 26 October). This approach aims to minimize the exploitation of publicly known vulnerabilities and to give the developers time to issue a patch. Wintereenmas (25 January through 31 January). The Mozilla Foundation has implemented a policy on security bugs in order to help contributors to deal with security vulnerabilities.^[25] The policy restricts access to a security-related bug report to members of the security team until after Mozilla has shipped a fix for the problem. Paper Hat Day (4 January). In addition, the Mozilla Foundation operates a "bug bounty" scheme: people who report a valid critical security bug receive a US$500 cash reward (for each report) and a Mozilla T-shirt.^[23] According to the Mozilla Foundation, this "bug bounty" system aims to "encourage more people to find and report security bugs in our products, so that we can make our products even more secure than they already are."^[24] Also, all users can have access to the source code of Mozilla Firefox, to the internal design documentation, to forum discussions, and to other materials that can help in finding bugs.

Holidays originating in ancient Latvia. Once placed in the software, changes become visible for anyone else to consider, protest against, or improve.^[22]. Sweetest Day (third Saturday in October, Ohio, Wisconsin, and Michigan in the United States). At least one person besides the coder reviews proposed software changes, and typically yet another person carries out a "super-review". Queen's Day (30 March in the Netherlands). Open source advocates argue that an important characteristic of Firefox security lies in the fact that anyone can see its source code and that it therefore must rely upon sound security mechanisms rather than security through obscurity. Pioneer Day (24 July in Utah, United States). Some of Firefox's key security features include the use of the sandbox security model^[20], same origin policy and external protocol whitelisting ^[21].

Patriot's Day (third Monday in April in Massachusetts and Maine, United States). By default, Firefox downloads all files to a user's desktop on Windows and Mac OS X or to the user's home directory on GNU/Linux, but users can easily configure it to prompt for a specific download location. Mother-in-Law's Day (fourth Sunday in October, where?). Users can configure the browser to either open downloaded files automatically or save them directly to the disk. Martin Luther King Day (third Monday in January in the United States). Firefox also includes a customizable download manager. Loyalty Day (1 May in the United States). However, use of web feeds (RSS/Atom) has grown tremendously recently, making RSS-support an essential feature for a growing number of people.

Lee-Jackson-King Day (20 January) Combined holiday celebrated in the Commonwealth of Virginia from 1984 to 2000. When this feature was first introduced in version 1.0 PR, some users worried that Firefox was beginning to include non-essential features, and succumb to bloat, much like the Mozilla Suite. Independence day (observed by many different countries at different dates). Powered by RSS or Atom feeds, "Live Bookmarks", another feature of Firefox, allow users to dynamically monitor changes to their favorite news sources. Labour Day (Many European countries celebrate Labour Day on May 1). Firefox supports a number of extensions that assist in web development, including the powerful Venkman JavaScript debugger. Labor Day (a United States federal holiday that takes place on the first Monday of September). While not installed by default, the tools become available via a "custom" install.

Groundhog Day (2 February in United States and Canada). Firefox aficionados claim that no other browser includes the DOM Inspector, and that Firefox's JavaScript Console surpasses the consoles available in other browsers. Grandparent's Day (Sunday after September Labor Day - proclaimed in the United States by Jimmy Carter in 1978). Like the Mozilla Suite, Firefox comes with two web-development tools: a DOM Inspector and a JavaScript Console. Flag Day (14 June in the United States). Because of the use of DTD and property files for storing the string literals displayed to users, even users without a programming background can easily complete part of the internationalization and localization process, requiring only a simple text editor. Boxing Day (26 December in the Commonwealth of Nations). Contributors throughout the world have collaborated in translating the Firefox browser into many frequently used languages/locales, including some of the least often supported locales, such as Chichewa, but excluding Latvian, Malay, Arabic, Thai, Vietnamese, Hindi and Persian.

International Women's Day (8th of March, particularly in Eastern European Countries). However, it may occasionally cause problems, especially with extensions. United Nations holidays. This functionality is useful for users who dual-boot their machines. Halloween (31 October). Therefore, a profile may be used on multiple platforms, so long as all of the platforms can access the profile (e.g., the profile is stored on a FAT32 partition accessible from both Windows and GNU/Linux). Father's Day (third Sunday in June; 19 March, others; 8 August, Republic of China). Firefox uses the same format to store users' profiles (which contain their personal browser settings) even on different operating systems.

World Ocean Day (8 June). Builds for Windows XP Professional x64 Edition also exist. Mother's Day (second Sunday in May in North America, fourth Sunday in Lent in UK). Operating systems not officially supported by the Mozilla developers, but known to run the browser include:. Labour Day, Worker's Day or May Day (1 May, most countries - United States and Canada are prominent exceptions). Since the Mozilla Foundation makes the Firefox source code available, users can also compile and run Firefox on a variety of other architectures and operating systems. Earth Day (22 April). Firefox does not officially support Windows 95, but reportedly functions properly after the application of a few tweaks.^[16].

April Fool's Day (1 April). Releases available on the primary distribution site support the following operating systems^[15]:. Astronomy Day (date varies depending on cycle of Moon). Mozilla Firefox runs on a wide variety of platforms. Leap Day (29 February, every four years). Some of the Mozilla standards like XBL are also making their way to open standards (via WHATWG). Valentine's Day (14 February). Also, work continues on implementing standards currently missing such as APNG and XForms and improving support for SVG.

Perihelion (3-6 January, depending on year and location). Firefox has already implemented most of CSS Level 2 and some of the not-yet-completed CSS Level 3 standard. Happy Winter. Mozilla contributors constantly improve Firefox's support for existing standards. Happy Thanksgiving. Firefox also supports PNG images and variable transparency as opposed to Internet Explorer, which will not support it fully until the not-yet-released version 7.^[14] Indeed, Internet Explorer's lack of support for PNG images has occasioned much debate, as many web developers want to move away from the old GIF format, which does not have the same capabilities and image quality as PNG. Happy Solstice. Firefox has extensive support for most basic standards including HTML, XML, XHTML, CSS, ECMAScript (JavaScript), DOM, MathML, DTD, XSL and XPath.

Happy New Year. The Mozilla Foundation takes pride in Firefox's compliance with existing standards, especially W3C web standards. Happy Kwanzaa. Experimental features like HTTP pipelining often lurk hidden in the about:config menu. Joyous Yule. This mechanism enables features such as single-window mode and error pages, or speeding up page rendering by various tweaks. Happy Holiday(s). Additionally, Firefox stores many hidden preferences that users can access by typing about:config in the address bar.

Season's Greetings. A Firefox installation can keep all extensions and themes available on the Mozilla Update site up-to-date through Firefox's interface, which periodically checks for updates to installed themes and extensions. Happy Hanukkah. Beyond adding a new theme, users can customize Firefox's interface by moving and manipulating its various buttons, fields, and menus, and likewise by adding and deleting entire toolbars. Merry Christmas (sometimes referenced in Spanish or French as Feliz Navidad and Joyeux Noel). The Mozilla Update web site offers many themes for downloading. Preceded by New Year's Eve on 31 December, which is celebrated with festivities in anticipation of New Year's Day. Themes consist of packages of CSS and image files.

New Year's Day - (1 January) — Holiday observing the first day of the year in the Gregorian calendar. Firefox also supports a variety of themes/skins, which change its appearance. In many European countries it is also a holiday, called St Stephen's Day or the second day of Christmas. Occasionally, an extension becomes part of the official product (for example tabbed browsing, a feature which proved popular through the MultiZilla extension, eventually became part of standard Mozilla). Boxing Day (26 December) — Holiday observed in many Commonwealth countries on 26 December. One can view the extension system as a ground for experimentation, where one can test new functionalities. It was created in 1966. Many features formerly part of the Mozilla Suite, such as the ChatZilla IRC client and a calendar, have become Firefox extensions.

Kwanzaa (USA) - (26 December - 1 January) — Holiday observance held from December 26 to January 1 honoring African-American heritage, primarily in the United States. Wikipedia editors using Firefox v0.8-1.0.7 can even download a customised toolbar for Wikipedia editing. Christmas is also celebrated as a secular gift-giving holiday; other observances include the decoration of trees and houses. Through extensions (installed via XPInstall modules), users may activate new features, such as mouse gestures, advertisement blocking, proxy server switching, and debugging tools. Christmas Day - (25 December) — Christian holiday commemorating the traditional birth-date of Jesus. The design of Firefox aims at high extensibility. Hanukkah - (26 Kislev - 2/3 Tevet - almost always in December) — Jewish holiday celebrating the defeat of Seleucid forces who had tried to prevent Israel from practising Judaism, and also celebrating the miracle of the Menorah lights burning for eight days with only enough (olive) oil for one day. When a user enters a keyword into the address bar that is not recognized by Firefox (for example, simply typing "apple"), it automatically redirects the user to the first result yielded by a Google search for the word (or words).

It is celebrated by many as a secular holiday, and marks the beginning of the American "holiday season". Custom keywords are provided "out of the box" for Google Search, Google Stock Search, Dictionary.com, Urban Dictionary and Wikipedia. It is traditionally celebrated with a meal shared among friends and family in which turkey is eaten. For example, using a custom keyword, a user can type "google apple" into the address bar and be redirected to the results of a Google search for "apple". Thanksgiving - (fourth Thursday in November in USA, second Monday in October in Canada) — Holiday generally observed as an expression of gratitude, traditionally to God, for the autumn harvest. This feature allows users to access their bookmarks from the location bar using keywords (and an optional query parameter). Birth of Bahá'u'lláh. Additionally, Firefox supports the "custom keyword" feature introduced by the Mozilla Suite.

Birth of the Báb. Users may download more search plugins (including one for Wikipedia) from the Mycroft project or remove any unwanted ones. Martyrdom of the Báb. By default, Firefox allows users to search Google, Yahoo!, Amazon.com, Creative Commons, Dictionary.com, and eBay. Ascension of Bahá'u'lláh. Firefox also sports a built-in search toolbar with an extensible search engine listing. Declaration of the Báb. Also, if the user's exact query does not appear anywhere on the page, the "Find" box turns red.

12th Day of Ridvan. As the user types more of the word, Firefox refines its search. 9th Day of Ridvan. With this feature enabled, a user can simply begin typing a word while viewing a web page, and Firefox automatically searches for it and highlights the first instance found. 1st Day of Ridván. First, Firefox has an incremental find feature known as "find as you type". Naw Ruz (Bahá'í New Year). The browser has a number of features which help users find information.

Yom Kippur (Day of Atonement). Firefox 1.5 (Windows version) is also the first browser to meet US federal government requirements that software be easily accessible to users with physical impairments. Tu Bishvat (New year of the trees). It also supports various forms of keyboard navigation such as tabbing navigation and caret navigation (and in some builds, spatial navigation). Tisha B'Av. Firefox also belongs in the group of browsers which were first to adopt customizable pop-up blocking. Sukkot (The Feast of Tabernacles). This feature originated in the Mozilla Suite, which in turn had borrowed the feature from the popular MultiZilla extension for Mozilla.

Shavuot (Pentecost). Firefox supports tabbed browsing, which allows users to open multiple web pages in the same browser window. Rosh Hashanah (New Year). The design of Firefox's option panels leaves many of the infrequently used options found in the Mozilla Suite not visible in Firefox. Purim (Based on the events in the Biblical book of Esther). As a result, the interface appears less cluttered than that of many other internet suites. Passover. Developers put in a large amount of work towards simplifying Firefox's user interface.

Lag Ba'omer. Those interested can add (as extensions and plugins) many features not packaged with Firefox. Hanukkah (also: Chanukah; the Festival of Lights). The developers of Firefox aim to produce a browser that "just works" for most casual users. Ramadan. Mozilla Firefox 1.5 and future releases of Camino will also include the Java Embedding plugin,^[13] which allow Mac OS X users to run Java applets with the latest 1.4 and 5.0 versions of Java (the default Java software shipped by Apple is not compatible with any browser, except its own Safari). Festival of Muharram. Likely goals for Firefox include:^[12].

Eid ul-Adha, Greater Bairam. ^[11]. Eid ul-Fitr, Lesser Bairam