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Happy 5th Birthday To Firefox
halfEvilTech writes "Five years ago today, Mozilla released Firefox 1.0. Ars celebrates the occasion by taking a trip back in time to revisit our classic coverage of the original release." For fun, we dug up the oldest Slashdot Firefox story, which was a Firebird story proclaiming yet another name change from Feb '04. At least this name change stuck.
I think Microsoft should send them a cake to celebrate.
Yes it's an anecdote! Were you expecting original research in a Slashdot comment?
Instead of being a small, simple browser that just did one thing well; Firefox has become way too bloated and indeed the plans for the future seem to impart it with a ribbon-like interface and more nonsensical things. Doesn't sound too good for a nice well-loved product.
If you keep throwing chairs, one day you'll break windows....
5 years old? It's getting on a bit and I imagine its memory is starting to suffer a bit. You could almost go as far as to say that it's memory might start leaking soon.
Summation 2
Been using it since one of the early Phoenix versions (0.4 probably) in late 2002. It has come a long way, certainly, though not everything is good, as everyone's posts about "bloat" show. Still, I much prefer it over any other browser.
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum sonatur.
Netscape 1.0
Best Slashdot Co
Firefox is great. But it's all the amazing addons that make it really shine. So kudos to Mozilla, but even more kudos to all the hard-working code monkeys who gave us addons like NoScript, Adblock, and (appropriate for this forum) Slashdotter.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Recipes here. You can pick your own and then compile it yourself:-)
http://www.goodtoknow.co.uk/recipes/Cake
i remember the days of downloading phoenix each time i logged onto a lab computer. it was so small, compact, fast and great back then. firefox has come a long way and added a slew of useful features, but a lot of what once made it great is lost.
frog blast the vent core
Come on, Firefox has such bad feature bloat. I just use Emacs-w3m to surf. It's just as nice, but instead of feature bloat, you get the web via Emacs!
Hippo Birdie, Two Ewes
Hippo Birdie, Two Ewes
Hippo Birdie, dear Firefox
Hippo Birdie, Two Ewes
No one else sang.
While it is fun to say that Firefox is all bloated now in comparison to when it started (and many comments above seem to say that) this misses four points: 1) Software naturally becomes larger with more features over time. 2) Many of the features added are very good and very helpful 3) We live in an era where memory is not a precious commodity. It isn't like you are going to have a problem if you can't fit your web browsing program on your floppy disk or can't run it on 64K of memory. The real issue with Firefox is much more limited: There are memory leaking and stability issues that should have been better handled by now. Instead of adding all the features that have been added (some of which are very nice) many people would likely simply prefer to have just the really commonly used features and have it not crash so frequently.
Here's the Slashdot story from 5 years ago: Slashdot | Firefox 1.0 Released
When ever Firefox is mentioned on slashdot, always mention the memory leak problem .. :)
This isn't a troll. It's a hilarious comment that pokes fun at the fact the original poster's comment really wasn't that funny. There needs to be more comments like this to discourage people from trotting out the same tired jokes that weren't really that funny back when they were popular.
elrous0 needs to learn to be more original or just not say anything at all.
Probably laced with Arsenic/Belladona etc etc etc
I'd rather be riding my '63 Triumph T120.
In a continuation of the Open Source Mozilla party started in January 1998, the ongoing Firefox party has now reached it's five year mark. Mozilla.org announced their intention to keep the party going indefinitely.
The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy describes the Mozilla / Firefox party as follows:
The longest and most destructive party ever held is now into its fourth generation, and still no one shows any signs of leaving. Somebody did once look at his watch, but that was eleven years ago, and there has been no follow-up. The mess is extraordinary, and has to be seen to be believed, but if you don't have any particular need to believe it, then don't go and look, because you won't enjoy it. There have recently been some bangs and flashes up in the clouds, and there is one theory that this is a battle being fought between the fleets of several rival carpet-cleaning companies who are hovering over the thing like vultures, but you shouldn't believe anything you hear at parties, and particularly not anything you hear at this one.
I *still* think they should have renamed it "Suzaku".
But... the future refused to change.
I can't believe it will have been 5 years in December since supporters chipped in to place an ad in the NY Times. I'd definitely help place another one if only to get my name in the paper again! I hear the NY Times needs the revenue (*cough* adblock *cough*).
help fill in hidden movie endings @ End of the Credits
Just curious to know if I'm alone. As the web has gotten more bloated (not just firefox), I find I use lynx more for quick, routine checking of websites. And you can script it.
I like firefox a lot, but sometimes Lynx is better.
They still haven't got the thought controlled interface working - even in Russian...
I've been using Firefox since Phoenix 0.5 (December 2002 iirc, almost seven years now) and I have to say, the community process and the extensions make Firefox what it is.
Yes, these days there's another open source browser on the block (Chrome) and it too is very good. But it's great to have Mozilla and Firefox around because you can be sure that Mozilla will look after users' interests far more than Google or Microsoft will. If nothing else, it keeps the others honest.
So congratulations Firefox, and here's to five more years!
Firefox was mentioned way earlier than that, in 2002, by its original name, Phoenix.
http://tech.slashdot.org/story/02/09/24/1215252/Mozilla-Jumps-on-Lean-Browser-Bandwagon
Weren't many of us using (at least trying) Firefox well before the 1.0 release? I thought I remembered using 0.8 or something. So isn't Firefox older than 5 years?
-Rich
check out this Slashdot story about Phoenix 0.2: http://developers.slashdot.org/developers/02/10/07/1739241.shtml
I remember Mozilla and its slowness and seemingly hundreds of configuration options that I didn't care about. It was like they were trying to fit every possible feature into the software. Then I tried Phoenix and it was so much more pleasant to use, even at that young stage. I'm happy to see Firefox has survived this long and remains, for the most part, as great to use now as those early days.
And I don't exactly know why. Launching can take up to one minute (bug in 3.5). Typing a single character in the address bar can freeze the whole browser for 30 seconds or more... etc... I switched to Chrome as my main browser last week.
...and I think it is major win for all of us. Without Firefox it would be harder for Opera, Chrome, Safari to shine. Firefox pushed compatibility level of writing web pages, so for last years usually when you have done with FF, page worked for rest of bunch too (ok, except JS which is still major PITA). Yes, our mighty fox have experienced several shortcomings time after time, but overall, it have been smooth ride.
Ohh, and it has been excellent study case and example that with clever crowd marketing, art team and testing open source products also can be "simply cool" [tm].
user@ubuntubox:~$ stfu This server is going down for shutdown NOW!
One marthlow of flour
Two wigguns salt
Four bloggerts of sugar
1/10th bloggert salt
1/2 poind MS strychnine (add more for extra flavor)
Beat, stir, bake at 20 degrees (Microsoft degrees) for one MS minute
Dump honey on it for frosting.
Enjoy!
Free Martian Whores!
Hmm... This is the initial announcement I found from Sept 24, 2002... Back before the project was renamed Firebird, then FireFox
Enjoy: http://tech.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/09/24/1215252
Loren Osborn
Started as a side project to combat feature creep and bloating, now it has ~ 24% usage share and countless useful addons (those kind of bring back feature creep, but at least it's voluntary). It's really the community and the addon creators who have made it what it is today.
Is there anyone who used the old Mozilla browser and mail suite who doesn't hate Firefox/Thunderbird? I don't understand how anyone can like the dumbed-down Firefux and Thunderturd apps.
On the 6th birthday of Firefox, let's have a funeral for the 6th version of Internet Explorer. It's about time. 9 years is too long for a version of a browser to live.
When I installed Firefox on this machine via pacman, I had to download over 100 Mb of dependencies as well as the browser itself.
I wish there was a way that I could compile it without the mime types package and all the other garbage, and shell out to something like lftp or wget for when I wanted to download files, the way dillo does. If it wasn't for the fact that the forums I use, require redirection support that dillo doesn't have, I wouldn't use Firefox much at all any more, except maybe for YouTube.
I've got to ask; is writing a simple HTML renderer really so difficult? I wouldn't necessarily want to support every single tag in existence. HTML 3.2/4.0 without CSS/DOM would be fine. Most of DOM is just the usual spam implemented by corporations anywayz; if you know how to write decent HTML, you don't need it.
Re:1.0 right now (Score:5, Informative)
by metricmusic (766303) Alter Relationship on Tuesday November 09 2004, @08:14AM (#10764927) Its great! I downloaded it from here: http://mozilla.ussg.indiana.edu/pub/mozilla.org/fi refox/releases/1.0/win32/en-US/Firefox%201.0.zip Don't think slashdot will be able to bring down an edu. Go firefox!
Re:1.0 right now (Score:5, Funny)
by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 09 2004, @08:26AM (#10765036)
[Vader]I find your lack of faith distrubing[/Vader]...
If anyone is interested, you can see screenshots of early Mozilla versions, including Mozilla 1.0 and 1.1, at this archive.
This looks pretty good! I hate Paint. But I never quite found a crispy improvement until now.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
By convention, software is not officially released until it gets to version 1.0. Versions starting with a 0, like 0.5 or 0.8, are considered beta (again, by convention) and do not "count" in terms of release dates for the original package.
Only when you take the big plunge and increment up to version 1.0 do you get release cred.
---
ECHELON is a government program to find words like bomb, jihad, plutonium, assassinate, and anarchy.
bake [...] for one MS minute
Is that one MS minute of boot-up time or one MS minute of uptime? :->
You can always just surf /. with M-x w3m-with-sarcasm-overload-handler
The article contains major factual errors. I remember firefox coming out in 1982. http://uk.imdb.com/title/tt0083943/
Fair enough... It still doesn't seem like the 'real' anniversary to me, but I can be pretty hard-headed about stuff like that.
-Rich
From what I can tell, the first Slashdot article about Phoenix (now Firefox) is from September 2002:
http://tech.slashdot.org/story/02/09/24/1215252/Mozilla-Jumps-on-Lean-Browser-Bandwagon
I learned about it here, and have been happily using Firefox since Phoenix 0.3. Thank you Slashdot.
We reserve the right to serve refuse to anyone. -management