Firefox is 10 years old

Apparently, even the staff of the Mozilla Foundation did not want to recall what journalists of some online publications noticed - on September 23, 2002, the non-profit foundation Mozilla Foundation by the former participants of Netscape Communications released the first beta version of the Phoenix 0.1 browser, which historically can be considered the first version of the current Firefox browser.

Phoenix stayed under this name until April 2003, when due to a conflict of names with Phoenix Technologies (manufacturer of BIOS firmware), it was renamed Firebird. As it soon turned out, this name was already taken over by the well-known open source Firebird DBMS, and in 2004, finally, the first full-fledged version of the browser appeared under the now known name Firefox 1.0.

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Compared to Internet Explorer 6.0, Firefox offered such nice enhancements as tabs, RSS, theme changer, bookmarks bar and other tools that Micrsoft simply didn’t have. The popularity of the new browser increased in geometric progression, and in 2008 it overcame the mark of 500 million downloads, thus becoming the second most popular browser in the world.

After Google released its browser in 2008, Chrome, the position of Firefox can no longer be described as dominant among alternative IE browsers. According to StatCounter, 23% of web users currently use Firefox, while another member, Google Chrome itself, is struggling for leadership with Internet Explorer.

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