Come back with me to the turn of the century, circa 1996. Your humble narrator was working for campus police at Carnegie-Mellon University in Pittsburgh, creating FileMaker databases for their police reports. It wasn’t uncommon then to see DOS machines sitting beside Windows 95 machines and the web was a primitive and strange thing. There were only two browsers of note, Netscape and Internet Explorer, and firing either up was neither particularly comfortable or interesting. But, hidden deep behind Netscape’s bland carapace, was Mozilla. When you typed “about:mozilla” in the Netscape address bar, for example, you got:
And the beast shall come forth surrounded by a roiling cloud of vengeance. The house of the unbelievers shall be razed and they shall be scorched to the earth. Their tags shall blink until the end of days.
from The Book of Mozilla, 12:10
Pretty badass stuff, especially when most websites were dedicated to kittens and burgeoning corporate identity. I was hooked instantly. This was the browser for me and it slowly became the browser for everyone with self-respect and a brain.
Fast forward to 2004: Mozilla and Netscape were on the rocks and it looked like the browser wars had been won. IE was the victor. In order to combat bloat and “feature creep,” however, a ragtag team of coders led by Dave Hyatt and Blake Ross built something they called “Phoenix,” then “Firebird,” then, on November 9, 2004, Firefox 1.0 was born. This turned into the Mozilla suite – Firefox and Thunderbird – were born.
On this, the fifth anniversary of that momentous occasion, let’s all tip out a little Jolt for Netscape and toast to the future of Firefox, the best browser in the world. Best of all, the book of Mozilla is still being written and any time you type ‘about:mozilla’ into Firefox you get a red screen and a potent reminder of the early days of the Internet.
Happy birthday, Firefox.
Mammon slept. And the beast reborn spread over the earth and its numbers grew legion. And they proclaimed the times and sacrificed crops unto the fire, with the cunning of foxes. And they built a new world in their own image as promised by the sacred words, and spoke of the beast with their children. Mammon awoke, and lo! it was naught but a follower.
from The Book of Mozilla, 11:9
(10th Edition)
Happy birthday, you simply made my world easier.
Keep knock them out!!! :)
hey mozilla give me a job.
aside from that happy five oh to firefox. thanks mozilla.
me and my “Stop! Hammertime” plug-in rejoice this happy day!
Love the Book of Mozilla
Thank you, thank you, thank you for creating an option to the hideous, unsafe, disgusting Explorer…that would be even worse if they didn’t have Firefox, Chrome, Opera, etc. nipping at their heels. Imagine how many websites would be different (Facebook) for example, if innovation killer MSFT was in the only game in town.
happy 5th birthday firefox!!
Only 5???? seems like it has been longer, but then again in the tech world, products age in dogs years (1 year = 7 tech years).
Happy 35th…
happy bday FF! :D
For Firefox 5th birthday we check the brand name. Powered by The Life Design Company.
“Firefox”
Smoothly and exuberantly, either running business or working on other things. If possible start carefully; everything is going forward without any problems.
This name is supportive.
Chrome is the way of the future. Firefox you have served us well but you are heading down the same road as IE – sacrificing performance and stability for extensibility.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_chrome#Usage_tracking
If you want google to know whatever it is that you do on the web that is fine. People like me stick with Firefox because we care about the Open Web.
Quite misinformed. Here is a recent active/ongoing campaign that targets exactly what you claim to be ’sacrificed’.
https://wiki.mozilla.org/CrashKill
Great browser, did a lot of good, and still the browser of choice when developing. But “bloat” and “feature creep” have made it too cumbersome for plain old browsing. Just waiting for real release of chrome on the mac.
Half of America still doesn’t know who you are, Firefox. :(
I cried a little.
…and Firefox became the bloated pig they were trying to replace in 5 short years. FAIL.
Yeah, it makes me sad to use Firefox nowadays but to be honest it’s just in contrast to Chrome.
A year ago I browsed blissfully unaware of how slow Firefox really was.
Oh I was quite aware of how slow FF was before trying Chrome. Chrome’s blazing speed sealed the deal for me. Ordinary browsing now happens in Chrome. Whenever I need to use an extension, I open up FF or IE.
Hehe, yep. I really do love Chrome now. Especially on Linux, where all your alternatives are even slower than on Windows – including Firefox.
We need a video like this for Chrome in another 4 years.
Has it really only been 5 years?!?! Wow, I can’t remember life before you… how bizarre!
Happy b’day you foxxy young thing, may you have a long and fruitful life!
Happy Birthday.
Thank god for firefox. No firefox = no adblock.
I wonder why TechCrunch never really gives any love to Opera. Ever since v.10 came out I’ve been using it on my Mac and it’s quite fast.
Best browser in the world, my ass…
FireFox sucks.
And sorry to pass the buck on substantiation, but Google “firefox sucks” for any number of reasons, many of which I would claim as my own.
To be clear, I’m not championing any particular alternative, but as a web developer (and user) who is familiar with many of the subtleties and nuances of web-based application development, I can confidently say that for as many things that FireFox “gets right”, there are many other things that it “gets woefully wrong”.
A short-but-hardly-exhaustive list of sound-bite complaints: it’s slow to start up, its visual rendering is often rough-to-horrible, its “passive” handling of most exceptions makes it difficult to catch bugs in web pages, its standards-compliance is more mythical than real in some cases, its internal handling of multiple tabs tends to be inefficient and often buggy, it has a much larger RAM footprint than other browsers, it’s not as stable as most supporters claim, etc.
One last comment: The open source paradigm is a fine theoretical concept that promotes all sorts of warm fuzzies all around, but it rarely (gasp from the audience) leads to the most robust, maintainable, and extensible code. In my opinion, the “open source” argument is an argument against FF, rather than for it. I wish it were otherwise, both for FF and in general, but I haven’t seen sustainable proof of it yet…
A late greeting to firefox. HAPPY BIRTHDAY!
Belated Happy Birthday Mozilla. Features of Mozilla are amazing so i wish Best of Luck to Mozilla. Keep it up :)