Mozilla Celebrates Its 10th Birthday
I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes "Mozilla has turned 10 today. It's been a long, strange trip from being the once-dominant browser, going down to almost nothing, and returning to something like 25% of the browser market. 'With a sliding market share, Netscape decided to focus on its enterprise oriented products and gave away the browser but most importantly allow volunteers to work on the product. Mozilla was nothing but Netscape's user agent (the name a browser uses to contact the web server), a reminder of the first Netscape code name. Over time, Mozilla would become the name of the open source project, AOL would buy Netscape and Internet Explorer would get up to 90%+ of market share leading to the worst period in web browsers' history where innovation was a niche for Opera and IE remixes users.'"
I remember when Firefox was covered by Slashdot about 7 years ago. It was described as some itty bitty beta based vaguely on Netscape (which I personally hated), but it was mentioned that it was only some 5MB download. I thought, "Hey, it's free (my favorite price), it's small (I seriously needed better hardware), and it's cutting edge (geek factor)."
I downloaded it, installed it, learned I could move the buttons around and fell in love. Since then, I would always install Firefox on every computer I fixed. I require all friends to use it. I carry around FireFox portable (and thunderbird) on a thumbdrive so I can use it wherever and however I wish.
While in beta, it worked. The release candidates worked. The final versions worked. Tabs and middle click CHANGED what the internet was to me. Java control, add-ons, everything -- Thank you Firefox!