The History of Mozilla Firefox

Gsurface writes "Flexbeta has an article based on the history of Mozilla Firefox. The article goes build-by-build of every Firefox release since the early Phoenix days noting some of the most significant changes in every release."

Comments

changelog

[brontus3927]

Isn't that normally called a changelog?

Re:changelog

[Vamphyri]

Obligatory link to said historic changelogs list here

Re:changelog

[sgant]

They're still working on 1.0 though. Lots of bugs in the builds ending in 0.1968 and such.

Re:changelog

[DoubleWhopper]

Seriously. Ladies and Gentlemen, welcome to Short Attention Sp... Oooh, look! Shiny!

Re:changelog

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, USA 2.0 started somewhere around 1791 with the ratification of the Constitution. (USA 1.0 being the Articles of Confederation). There was an attempted fork in the mid-1800's, but the 16th Project Manager, Mr. Lincoln, prevented that from going very far. US History is much more amusing as a changelog.

Re:changelog

[JAppi]

The Changelog is actually more interesting.

Re:changelog

[syousef]

Actually they're release notes.

There is some reference to feature changes etc. but I miss the days of proper, easy to read, plain text change logs.

JWZ.

[Anonymous Coward]

The true history Jamie Zawinski.

Re:JWZ.

[starwed]

The true history... stopping at 1999. While an interesting read, this was way before the release of phoenix 0.1. Hell, this was three years before [i]mozilla 1.0[/i], as the massive rewrite of mozilla's codebase was in the embryonic phase.

Wow, the entire history!!!

[sgant]

From all the way back to...er...two and a half years ago?

Wow. Good thing we have that written down somewhere, are there even people still alive that remember that far back?

Re:Wow, the entire history!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

I remeber the good ol days when we used to call our stripped down versions of mozilla things like Phoenix and FireBird. But thats way before your time sonney.

Re:Wow, the entire history!!!

[justforaday]

Well, I remember the days when you could get this nifty little extension that would make it so you were running Mozilla MoonBunny or LavaWhale or whatever. I miss those days... :'( *sniff*

Re:Wow, the entire history!!!

[EnronHaliburton2004]

Bah, you youngin'.

I remember when we used to call our stripped down version of Netscape things like Mozilla.

Re:Wow, the entire history!!!

[mabinogi]

it gave them something to hope for!

Re:Wow, the entire history!!!

[downundarob]

You youngsters never learn, I rememebr when the only gui based option was Mosaic.. Even then gopher was heaps better...

Re:Wow, the entire history!!!

[l3ert]

Yep, in those days we had to walk to the only place in town that had Internet access, uphill both ways, in order to get a copy.

Re:Wow, the entire history!!!

[EnronHaliburton2004]

Bah! Bah, I say!

You kids never used the WorldWideWeb browser... it had a gui, but no inline graphics.

Re:Wow, the entire history!!!

[Zapper]

stripped down *cough*, yeah right.
great big bloated mess of slow-loading, cpu hogging non-internet explorer goodness. :-)

Re:Wow, the entire history!!!

[Saeger]

Very funny, except how much history is packed into those 2.5 years? Quite a bit. It's the whole exponential nature of progress thing. Every year that we build on past advances we compress more progress into less time (until... Singularity in ~2030).

Oh, and FireFox NeuralInterface Edition 12.0.1 is much faster than IE 7.501 SP4

Looks like the history is history

[RadioheadKid]

mirrors?

whoops

[ack154]

There is a problem with the database that is preventing the site from working.

An email has been sent to the administrator notifying them of the problem. Please try again later.

That administrator is going to get a LOT of emails. Oh, and I believe that "problem" it's talking about is called Slashdot.

Re:whoops

[GFPerez]

Is the "slashdot effect" that fast? This story has just been posted...

Re:whoops

[darkpixel2k]

You must be new here...

Re:whoops

[darkpixel2k]

That administrator is going to get a LOT of emails. Oh, and I believe that "problem" it's talking about is called Slashdot.


Wow. This time we took down a webserver *and* an email server.

Maybe someone should submit a story about those guys who hooked a coffee pot to the web so they could brew coffee from their workstations.

We're looking at the wrong browser...

[wcitech]

I'd be more interested in looking at a brief history of Internet Explorer, for the same reasons that they teach kids history in school. (to prevent it from repeating).

Re:We're looking at the wrong browser...

[El Cubano]

I'd be more interested in looking at a brief history of Internet Explorer, for the same reasons that they teach kids history in school. (to prevent it from repeating).

I know you are trying to be funny, but only a fool feels that his own history is not worth examining. (Hint: Mozilla has made mistakes in its own past that we should try and avoid repeating in the future.)

Re:We're looking at the wrong browser...

[mpath]

That reminds me -- does anyone remember when IE 4 came out and they offered a Midnight Madness promotion? The release would be available at midnight and the first million folks would get a free t-shirt.

Never got my t-shirt ...

Re:We're looking at the wrong browser...

[Jugalator]

I get the joke, but here's a link:
The History of Internet Explorer

Re:We're looking at the wrong browser...

[Spheroid2]

Yes, and we all know how well that works.

Grrrrr.

[flynns]

Slashdotted at two comments. I blame it all on those pesky "subscribers". Slashdotting the page before us commoners can do it.

What, are we not GOOD enough to slashdot FlexBeta?? HMMM?

Re:Grrrrr.

[1davo]

Well, I for one was sorry the link worked when I checked it out.

Too much friggin flash crap assaulting my eyes.

No wonder they call it flash

I look at computer screens for 10 to 12 hours a day at work.

The last thing I want to see when I get home to do my surfing for pleasure is a bunch of cartoony flash.

Spank the Monkey ... and win an iPod

The site got slashdotted

[ospirata]

Does anyone knows if this text is replicated anywhere else?

virtuanews database error

[Random Web Developer]

" There is a problem with the database that is preventing the site from working.

An email has been sent to the administrator notifying them of the problem. Please try again later. "

Wonder how much emails that guy will get

Re:virtuanews database error

[rbanffy]

" There is a problem with the database that is preventing the site from working.

There is also a problem with the administrator's email account that prevents me from notifying them of the problem. Please try again later. "

Re:Where can we get the history of slahdot?

[dotslasher_sri]

offtopic.. but wikipeida does provide a very good history about slashdot. make sure you read the slashdot subculture too. hilarious!

big deal

[us7892]

Meandering my around the ads, on this ad filled site, I finally chose the "printable version", so I could read the article in peace. I actually remember most of what is in this piece. Not much to see here...

Re:big deal

[BorgHunter]

Tried Adblock?

The history of IE

[michelcultivo]

Day 1: New feature implemented Day 2: 10 bugs discovered today Day 3: Thats 10 bugs give me into another 2 bugs Day 4: New feature that work only with IE (haha netscape guys!!) Day 5: That feature give me another bug (Arrrhh!) Day 6: Where we are going today with this *#*$@!?

/.ed

[roman_mir]

well, if not the history of FF we can at least appreciate the legacy of /. I can't read the story, the server's database is dead.

guys, it's really simple and I now do it when I post content anywhere: .nyud.net:8090

oh well, if not the history of FF, here is a link to my FF extension.

Re:/.ed

[FidelCatsro]

its a shame when a site gets slashdoted like this , the main advantage of nyud.net is the coral cach is Ad safe (the origional site is credited with the Click etc iirc, this takes away the major mirroring concern of alot of people)

PS: :P i should now do my speach about tacking on ads , but i know a couple of people who would find the extension very usefull so i shall instead forward the link to them

Re:/.ed

[roman_mir]

isn't history of FF also an ad of some sort? In any case this is an FOSS site and the software in question is GPLed.

Re:Where can we get the history of slahdot?

[Teja]

Here you can learn a bit of the history of slashdot. Also, you can browse through some of the older slashdot posts http://slashdot.org">Here

/. Your E-mail

[BinaryLobster]

Niffty way to enhance the /. effect to include your e-mail server too.

------

If we were all rocket scientists, there would be more uses for rockets.

Re:wtf

[oddsends]

It didn't even take that long

Re:Where can we get the history of slahdot?

[Teja]

http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://slashdot.org has some of the older versions of slashdot, so that should give you a glimpse of the history of slashdot I suppose

Re:Where can we get the history of slahdot?

[Sunkist]

...or how about a history of slashdotting?

Re:You know your old skool...

[Timesprout]

You know your old skool if your school education did not include spelling or grammar.

Re:Wow

[xstonedogx]

An email has been sent to the administrator notifying them of the problem. Please try again late.

Apparently he does his best problem solving at night.

let's hope

[Sv-Manowar]

Let's hope for the day they can add "Firefox usage overtakes IE usage" to that page. Although it may not be perfect, Firefox (pheonix, firebird etc) has been revolutionary - and I believe it has generally increase people's awareness about the web.

Well done to all the developers involved in the developement. Keep up the good work.

History of slashdot is here.

[RandoX]

http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://slashdot.org

since 0.2

[BinLadenMyHero]

I've been using Firefox since the 0.2 release, and exclusively since 0.3, when it became good enough for everyday use.

Re:since 0.2

[BarryNorton]

Can I have your autograph? The impact of this story has just blown me away and you, sir, are my hero!

why?

[kin_korn_karn]

what's the point of things like this? Is this really news?

I'm not a paying subscriber and I'm not one to bitch about the stories but "Someone posted the FireFox changelog" is not news.

cant they just do a search on Slashdot?

[night_flyer]

version .01 released,
version .02 released,
version .03 released,
version .04 released,
version .05 released,
version .06 released,
version .07 released,
version .08 released,
version .09 released

Mirrordot mirror

[Winckle]

http://www.mirrordot.org/stories/8edf94739c87f105c f8051329b6b6dd7/index.html Mirror

Re:Mirrordot mirror

[alfrin]

Well at least we get the cache of the wonderful indroduction page, i never wanted the History anyways.

Mirrordot cache

[amembleton]

Mirrordot cache

Just like Slashdot, coral cache doesn't seem to have a working copy.

Re:Wow

[LWATCDR]

I wonder if they are using Firebird as the backend?

Sounds exciting...

[Anonymous Coward]

Coming next: build-by-build history of Linux, including every minor release.

Re:Wow

[superpulpsicle]

No problem I'll fill you in.

- Firefox released 1.0PR, people got confused with what PR means. Potato and Raisin, Pizza Ready

- Firefox released 1.0, a cazillion people switched over from IE. All this time people thought the spyware was part of every websites.

- Firefox now owns 7% of the browser market. The number of people downloading IE.... 0%.

Text, sans images...

[wx327]

- Flexbeta (http://www.flexbeta.net/index.php)
-- The History of Mozilla Firefox: From Phoenix, to Firebird, to Firefox (http://www.flexbeta.net/articles.php?action=showd &showarticle=89) Flexbeta Home
The History of Mozilla Firefox: From Phoenix, to Firebird, to Firefox
Posted by Gsurface on 30 Mar 2005 - 22:41
Introduction

Firefox is not just a browser; it is a religion, a way of life some might say, and for others, like me, a great damn way of reaching the web without all the ugly stuff that comes with it. Firefox has gone a long way, from name changes to added features, to conquering market share off of the world's most popular browser. Firefox has reached millions via not just web, but also through newspaper headlines all funded by Firefox users themselves. Many of the current Firefox users have been loyal users since the bird's initial flight, and though Firefox has been in the wild now for quiet some time, there are plenty of Firefox users that have recently discovered this marvelous browser. The Firefox browser was previously known as Firebird and before that, Phoenix. While the name has changed, the concepts remain the same. The history of Firefox begins with an idea to make an already existing web browser faster and leaner. Originally dubbed Phoenix, the browser within a few years turns into a revolution, an escape for many from the constant security vulnerabilities from Internet Explorer. The story starts with Phoenix 0.1, and builds up to what we know today as Mozilla Firefox.

Phoenix 0.1 - 0.3

Phoenix 0.1
Firefox begins not as Firefox, but as Phoenix, which was initially made public on September 23, 2002. The Phoenix browser, which uses a large amount of the Mozilla code, was designed to be a lean and fast browser that loads in about half the time of Mozilla. The initial release was codenamed "Pescadero", which means fisherman in Spanish, with a build of 0.1. Phoenix did not feature an installer, rather the user had to download the file and run the executable. Though the menus were customizable, there wasn't much to add to the toolbar. The only items that were available were the home icon, print icon, a go button and a button to go to the Mozilla home page. Though still a baby, Phoenix had a lot to offer such as a download manager which IE did not contain. Looking into the preferences, Phoenix 0.1 had little options for the user (compared to newer builds). This initial build did not contain a Google search engine on the toolbar, but it did contain a popup blocker and tabbed browsing. Certain shortcut features such as writing the URL then pressing Ctrl + Enter to automatically enter the .COM part of the URL was not available in 0.1. Phoenix 0.1 did not include a sidebar, which in the second release the Mozilla team would implement it.

Phoenix 0.2
The second release of Mozilla Phoenix, build 0.2, codenamed Santa Cruz, was released a few days after 0.1 on October 10th, 2002. Plenty of features were added to this new build including the sidebar, which allowed the user to view either their bookmarks, history, or recent downloads as a side window of the browser. Other enhancements were implemented including new options to the preferences section. Now users were able to disable Java and edit some tab browsing options. Phoenix 0.2 also introduced the ability to add extensions and themes to the browser.

The toolbar customization went through a huge overhaul. The user was able to add much more icons to their toolbar including a history icon, downloads, bookmarks, new window and a search bar. The search bar was for searching on the current page, dmoz.org, and Google, of course. Phoenix 0.2 was also marginally faster than 0.1, though it was very hard to notice the difference. Though some bugs were fixed in this build, the Mozilla team concentrated more on enhancing the browser and dedicat

Re:Text, sans images...

[jez9999]

Whew. 2 name changes... good job they did their homework and, being so desperate to have a unique name, finally settled on a name that was really unique!

Re:Text, sans images...

[mav[LAG]]

Pity the ads at the top didn't show up. The one says "Fix Internet Explorer!" and the other says "Internet Explorer Fixed!" which was quite appropriate for this article I think.

It's all there in The Book

[Juiblex]

"And so at last the beast fell and the unbelievers rejoiced. But all was not lost, for from the ash rose a great bird. The bird gazed down upon the unbelievers and cast fire and thunder upon them. For the beast had been reborn with its strength renewed, and the followers of Mammon cowered in horror." from The Book of Mozilla, 7:15 P.S: Ain't Mammon that Devil's son in the Constantine movie?

Re:It's all there in The Book

[dirty]

Yeah and Balthasar was a demon in the movie, despite traditionally being one of the three magi that visited Jesus at his birth. The other two being Melchior and Casper.

Have a look

[Swamii]

Going way back to Slashdot circa 1998, posing the question, "Should Netscape GPL Mozilla?"? Link is http://web.archive.org/web/19980113191222/http://s lashdot.org/

Re:Have a look

[HalliS]

I couldn't find the poll it self, but after some googling I found this post:
-----------------


Netscape should GPL their code (Score:1)
by StuffYourReligion (452006) Alter Relationship on Tuesday October 01, @07:03PM (#4368887) (http://www.nomeaning.net/)

On Jan 6, 1998, CmdrTaco wrote:

Perhaps the solution to Netscape's problem is more obvious then they may realize. If they GPLd their code and gave it out to the world, we would have a slew of powerful browsers developed by the same programmers that have brought us all those other great GPL apps. That would jump start the free browser universe and maybe people would focus on a single browser instead of dividing their time amongst so many other free browser projects. And since it is free, people may choose it instead of MS. Just a thought...

Just a thought, indeed... though I'm glad there's a diversity of free browser projects. Too bad Netscape waited so long; from here it's a long, uphill battle to regain ground.
--------------
(Archive.org doesn't seem to have said poll or the CmdrTaco editorial in it's archive..)

Slew of browsers you say?

Mirrordot

[bonch]

Mirrordot has the article mirrored.

Re:Where can we get the history of slahdot?

[justforaday]

Why would I want to read about a petrified goatse filled with hot grits? *shudder*

Another Mozilla Article?

[bryan8m]

I've lost track of how many Mozilla posts there have been on Slashdot in the past few days. Glad to see it's really starting to catch on though!

Re:Where can we get the history of slahdot?

[Drooling Iguana]

I think we get enough people complaining about dupes as it is.

Thanks /. !

[Anonymous Coward]

Now I'll never get to find out which version of FF I should download. On the other hand, we will at least get to have The History of Flexbeta:

3:15 Article on FF history posted on Flexbeta
3:19 Slashdot posts article about Flexbeta's article
3:20 Smoke starts coming from Flexbeta
3:21 Sparks fly from Flexbeta
3:22 Feeding tube is removed from Flexbeta
3:23 Flexbeta is dead. R.I.P.

Some admins use sms

[Baorc]

I'm not going to post it again, but after it got /.'ed it sends an email to the admin everytime someone visits it.

Thing is, some admins have a message sent to their cell phones everytime one of their sever crashes, on top, usually that costs 0.05$ a message. Actually I have no clue but for arguments sake let's say it was 0.05$. Take a guess at how many people clicked that link sending a message to his email who, if enabled, sends a message to his phone.

I really don't want to see that bill!

Re:Some admins use sms

[Tristandh]

Wouldn't you think in case of multiple instances of 1 error (take /. for example) 1 mail would be sent saying "We're having trouble, fix it" (and maybe at regular intervals an update on the situation)? I'd be surprised if many admins of a site with any serious traffic has his server send him an email everytime en error occurs.

Re:Some admins use sms

[Baorc]

But from TFA which I didn't paste because so many other people did in their comments, it said an email had been sent, hence the message from the email, its purely hypothetical.

Slightly on topic

[acebone]

Just found this delicious article on howstuff works:

http://computer.howstuffworks.com/firefox.htm/prin table

BTW - I keep forgetting the name of the service that provides automatic mirroring of websites. It is some stateside university that is behind it. Wouldn't it be a GREAT idea if either story submitters or Slashdot story posters browsed through the links in a submission via that service and then posted the alternate URLs as well as the original ??? Or am I commiting sacrilege by proposing something that could almost kill the slashdot effect ?

ignorant piece

[NynexNinja]

Its pretty ignorant for someone to write a piece about the "history of mozilla firefox" without discussing Netscape, Mosaic, etc...

Re:ignorant piece

[jonored]

I do find it sad that the article doesn't contain those origins of Firefox. I find it pleasantly amusing that Netscape could be seen as pulling an Atreides move when they threw themselves to open source, and now here we have it, this decendent of Netscape, coming back and challenging Internet Explorer's grip on the 'web. But then, I suppose I just like the comparison of open source developers to fremen and microsoft to house harkonnen...

history?

[wjeff]

I love Firefox as much as the next geek, but come on guys, do you think we can limit the historical studies to subjects which have not come about within the lifetime of a teenager, much less an infant.

Re:Where can we get the history of slahdot?

[Anonymous Coward]

Where can we get the history of slahdot? That would be interesting!

That's simple. Just take a 1 000 000 monkeys and make them write text with computers. Save every page they produce and after a few years, you got the whole history of Slashdot.

Re:Where can we get the history of slahdot?

[NanoGator]

"Where can we get the history of slahdot? That would be interesting!"

Feb 1st... Mozilla releases a small incremental version update, headline news.

Feb 7th... Mozilla releases a small incremental version update, headline news.

Feb 14th.. Mozilla releases a small incremental version update, headline news.

Feb 15th... Dupe of Mozilla making a small incremental update.

Feb 19th... Mozilla releases a small incremental version update, headline news.

Experience

[AShuvalov]

Experience is that nice thing, which let you recognise your old mistake when you do it again.

Slight, very offtopic, language correction.

[perseguidor]

"Pescadero" the codename for 0.1, doesn't mean 'fisherman' in spanish. That would be "Pescador".

"Pescadero" is the person that sells the fish.

tried ff and went back

[chunderfest]

No matter which part of the phase you joined the team of Firefox users; there is one thing I am sure of, once you go Firefox, you never go back.

I joined at 0.8 and left again at 1.0. The mozilla suite is just plain more stable, often faster, and doesn't have ff's longstanding habit of crashing when printing to a file if CUPS is installed. In addition, while the extensions architecture may be clunkier in the suite, it's also more robust (for me at least). ff 1.0 kept dropping my extensions.

It didn't start with Phoenix 0.1

[Draconix]

Technically, it started with Netscape, then moved on to Mozilla. At the end of 2001, some Mac OS X developers came along and decided to create a stand-alone browser for OS X based on Mozilla, without the extras like the HTML editor, IRC client, email client, etc. This browser was first released as Chimera in the beginning of 2002. Chimera steadily got more and more popular under OS X, and ended up being _the_ browser for OS X users until Apple finally released Safari. After the success of Chimera in its first few months, Phoenix was conceived as, effectively, an attempt to combine the simplicity of Chimera with the cross-platform capability and UI of the main Mozilla browser. In other words, Phoenix didn't just pop up out of the blue, it had an inspiration that (sadly) most people seem to have forgotten.

Yes, I am using what Chimera became (Camino), and yes, perhaps I am a bit of a fanboy of it. It's an extremely solid browser, and despite its popularity waning due to Safari, it's still being developed, and I'm happy with its progress.

Re:It didn't start with Phoenix 0.1

[ahg]

Technically, it started with Netscape

Technically, the original Netscape was a derivative of NCSA Mosaic

Conclusion: Firefox started off as Mosaic, written by grad students... like all good software :-)

It's happening

[kryptik_79]

I saw it in December:

Firefox 933,550 sessions, 23.73%
Internet Explorer 887,065 sessions, 22.55%

Re:Where can we get the history of slahdot?

[STrinity]

...and then on Saturday, Timothy posted twelve articles, all of them dupes...

From the article...

[fondue]

"Firefox is not just a browser; it is a religion, a way of life some might say, and for others, like me, a great damn way of reaching the web without all the ugly stuff that comes with it."

"Ugly stuff" such as a few short paragraphs of text drowned in innumerable pages of intrusive god-damned advertisements.

Firefox isn't a fox! It's a red panda..

[dcbarker]

A half-decent article but he/she mentions Firefox as being a small red fox. It's not. It's a red panda. One glimpse at the Firefox FAQ reveals this..

Wikipedia has one too

[ta bu shi da yu]

See History and development of Mozilla Firefox. Might be useful to compare against this article.

Printable link was:changelog

[papukanghi]

What crap breaking down the page into a million pages. here is the printable link

http://www.flexbeta.net/main/printarticle.php?id=8 9