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Happy 5th Birthday To Firefox

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the they-get-bloated-so-fast dept.

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.

16 of 252 comments (clear)

  1. Original Firefox goals forgotten... by jkrise · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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....
    1. Re:Original Firefox goals forgotten... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

      uh. what?
      First off, there isn't going to be any ribbon interface.
      Secondly, Firefox is still focused on only being a browser, nothing else.
      What is this bloat?
      addons.mozilla.org is where all the bloat is.

    2. Re:Original Firefox goals forgotten... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

      Screw that ... the Awesomebar is the first useful browser UI innovation I've seen since tabs.

    3. Re:Original Firefox goals forgotten... by bcrowell · · Score: 3, Interesting

      You can disable it entirely (the functionality not just the look) in FF3.5, so what exactly is your problem with me using it?

      I spent a lot of time learning how to disable it as much as possible in firefox 3.0. It was a huge time-sink, and I still didn't succeed in disabling it entirely. So that in itself is a problem: there is functionality that a lot of people wanted to disable, and hated so much that they were willing to work hard to disable it, but they couldn't disable it. This reminds me of the situation with IE on Windows. A lot of people put a lot of effort into figuring out how to remove IE from Windows. Basically it's impossible to completely remove it. I think any unbiased observer would agree that this is a bad thing.

      Are you saying that as of firefox 3.5 it is now possible (which it wasn't in 3.0) to easily and completely disable the awesome bar? If so then (a) please tell me how to do it, and (b) the fact that it's such a well-kept secret how to remove it shows that there is a problem with loading this much bloat into the browser.

      --
      Find free books.
    4. Re:Original Firefox goals forgotten... by mrdoogee · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Count me among the folks who was initially resistant to the Awesomebar. I even went as far as downloading addons to turn it off (well the look of it at least). But strangely enough when 3.5 came out, I left it on, and now I find it quite useful.

      Of course, in 3.5 I did have to re-edit my userChrome.css so that closing all tabs leaves the application window open.

      oh well. I'll keep using FF until somebody builds a better ad blocker than adblock+ for Firefox. That's MY killer app.

    5. Re:Original Firefox goals forgotten... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Interesting

      No i think people that remove IE from windows are idiots, if you don't like some functionality don't use it, removing it from the OS to save 100MB on a 7GB install is a waste of time.

      Wow, does the ignorance of Windows users know any bounds? One of the first rules in any securing any operating system is removing unnecessary programs and services. As IE has had such a colorful history of vulnerabilities, it would be the first thing I would want to chuck were I forced to use Windows for anything. The fact that people like you are so shell- shocked to believe that a browser should be hooked so deeply as to be practically irremovable just boggles my mind. And arguing the contrary just makes you sound ignorant. Oh, you say other programs and the "help" system relies on the IE html renderer? Ha ha. You people are hopeless.

    6. Re:Original Firefox goals forgotten... by bcrowell · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Yes. It's about:config, then set "browser.urlbar.maxRichResults" to ZERO. Simple enough?

      Nope, I already knew about that setting, and it actually doesn't turn off the awesombar's behavior. Here are the two configuration settings that I know of that I've already applied:

      user_pref("browser.urlbar.maxRichResults",4); // only show 4 matches when typing in url bar
      user_pref("browser.urlbar.matchBehavior",2); // only match at word boundaries when typing in url bar

      With these settings, I still don't get back the pre-awesomebar behavior. When I type in a partial URL, it still shows me matches based on the text of the web page, not just the URL.

      --
      Find free books.
  2. cookies are delicious delicacies by syrinx · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.
  3. Re:A cake is in order by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

    They did this for v 2.0: http://www.flickr.com/photos/jollyjake/278562314/

  4. 5 Years by pgn674 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Here's the Slashdot story from 5 years ago: Slashdot | Firefox 1.0 Released

  5. MOD Parent UP by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

    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.

  6. Re:Comments about bloat by Marcika · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Of all things, why should a *web browser* be a memory pig?

    Because people want it to be. People want the browser to not only remember the browser history of 10 tabs 20-deep, but to cache it in RAM as well, so that the Forward and Back buttons feel responsive and the hard drive is not thrashing all the time. Since each of these pages has all the bloat of JavaScript, CSS or even Flash, it adds up. (And of course you can reconfigure Firefox to a small footprint if you want...)

  7. Re:A cake is in order by Jugalator · · Score: 2, Interesting

    It's a trap! ;)

    Honestly, I remember that one and thought it was nice of them.
    They also did it again for Firefox 3. :)

    http://www.openbuddha.com/2008/06/17/ie-sends-mozilla-a-new-cake-for-firefox-3/

    --
    Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
  8. Re:A cake is in order by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I remember in the days of Windows 3.1, it seemed like a big deal that you could change IP address on Linux without rebooting.

    I remember being in a meeting with a bunch of windows people... guys were talking about changing IP addresses on WfW.. not being familiar with Windows (but familiar with TCP/IP on Unix and Unix-like systems) I asked "why on earth do you need to reboot just to change an IP address?"... everybody in the room turned to look at me like I had grown an extra arm out of the top of my head.

    I couldn't believe it when they told me that Windows needed a reboot for that. It *still* boggles my mind.

  9. Re:When ever Firefox is mentioned on slashdot by comm2k · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Funny looking at the original slashdot story from 5 years ago there is at least one comment saying that FF/TB eat a lot of memory. http://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=129027&cid=10765186

  10. Re:A cake is in order by Nerdposeur · · Score: 3, Interesting

    FYI - If you're using Paint to crop photos, Paint.net is a free program that does much better resizing, cropping, saving in different formats, and a lot else (although the rest may not matter to you).

    I don't do much with images besides crop and resize, but I still strongly prefer Paint.net to Paint.