Firefox is five years old

Today marks exactly five years since the release of the first version of Firefox. The historical release of Firefox 1.0 took place on November 9, 2004.

The immediate parent of Firefox was the open source browser Mozilla, which has been distributed since 2002, but was generally considered unsuccessful. The “Fire Fox” was supposed to be a big work on the bugs and the second attempt to remove the main competitor from the throne - Microsoft Internet Explorer. It seemed almost impossible task.

Five years later, the situation has changed dramatically. And while IE is still leading with 60% of the market, about one out of every four people on the Internet now uses Firefox. This achievement can be considered the undoubted success of an open project, which puts it on par with other non-commercial phenomena of the new era, such as Wikipedia, Ubuntu Linux, WordPress and the World Wide Web itself.

Five years ago, the main task seemed to be the battle with Microsoft. Indeed, in the absence of competition, this company had the opportunity to impose its network standards and form the image of the Network as it wanted to see. But the popularity of Firefox created a new platform for web standards and made Redmond take open technologies seriously.
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Now, Firefox faces a bigger challenge. This browser needs to continue to innovate and try to meet the requirements of a constantly changing and much more competitive market.

“When there was only us and Microsoft, the plot was simple - a little guy against a giant,” said Mike Beltzner, director of development for Firefox. “Now, in the ring, heavyweights like Microsoft, Google, and Apple all fight each other, so the plot becomes much more interesting.”

The Network itself has changed significantly over the past five years. This is no longer the web of hypertext documents, but a full-scale platform for real applications that run inside the browser and communicate with each other. Five years ago, this was nothing. There was no “Web 2.0” concept, Google Maps had not yet appeared, and the Gmail just launched was new. The fact is that then the browsers were not yet ready to support all these features, that is, the Web as a software platform.

Firefox has become one of the first browsers for the new web. As a result, he quickly gained support from developers and users. But soon the fiercest competition began. An entire ecosystem of excellent browsers already exists: Apple Safari is nostalgic on Firefox, they are quickly caught up by Internet Explorer, and Google Chrome released a year ago takes on the advantages that Firefox once achieved: unsurpassed simplicity and speed.

In addition, Google has launched a broad public relations campaign to promote the use of the browser as a platform for applications such as Gmail and Google Docs. They successfully embed the importance of browser features such as speed and performance into the minds of developers and the general public.

In other words, Google again made the browser race a fascinating experience [Google brought sexy back to the browser].

Thanks to Chrome, it became interesting again to discuss various technological features in browsers, engines for rendering and processing scripts, etc. All this again became interesting to the public. Actually, even Mozilla benefited from this: they started to make shows from each new feature in Firefox and opened the Hacks blog, where they constantly publish announcements and videos with a demonstration of future features, sometimes up to three or four videos per week.

In the new environment, it was decided to release new versions of Firefox more often than before. Indeed, between the release of Firefox 2 and 3 two years have passed - a whole epoch by the standards of the Internet. According to the new plan, releases will be released at least once every six months. So, Firefox 3.6 should be released before the end of 2009.

The conceptual challenges that Firefox developers set themselves are to improve HTML5 support, as well as lobby for open standards for Web Open Font Format (WOFF) and Ogg Theora video fonts. The principle of openness will remain a key element in the development of Firefox in the future.