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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.

7 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 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.
  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. 5 Years by pgn674 · · Score: 4, Interesting

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

  4. 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.

  5. 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

  6. 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.