Ninth Anniversary of Firefox 1.0 Release

Nine years ago today, Firefox 1.0 was released. Mozilla writes "Mozilla created Firefox to be an amazingly fun, safe, and fast Web browser that embodies the values of our mission to promote openness, innovation and opportunity online. In the nine years since we first launched Firefox, we have moved and shaped the Web into the most valuable public resource of our time." The first release of the little project to write a lighter alternative to Seamonkey is a bit over a year older.

Comments

don't care.

[gl4ss]

phoenix was where it was at.

it all started going downhill after politics and marketing departments of mozilla got involved.

the 1.0 release was pretty much meaningless milestone in the big picture for the project. imho phoenix 0.2 should be the release to celebrate if any.

Re:don't care.

[Runaway1956]

Yep. The youngsters won't remember that, and some of the not-so-young have forgotten it. If Firefox disappeared tomorrow, and we never saw another release, it would have served it's primary purpose. We would still have four major browsers available, all largely "standards compliant", along with a number of less popular browsers. Firefox changed the landscape, dramatically.

I can't even remember which milestone I started on now, but it seemed to take FOREVER for 1.0 to come out. I guess it's close to a decade since I grabbed my first copy of Firefox now. To lazy to look up the dates for all the point.whatever releases.

Re: Chrome Is Better

[jemmyw]

No. I used Chrome for a few years there but I got unhappy that it was the only closed source application I was using on a daily basis. So I moved back to Firefox and have found it a good experience. The only gripe I have after 9 months is that the dev tools feel slugish.

I'm even using Firefox on Android and find that better than Chrome.

Re:It's a self-correcting problem.

[Runaway1956]

I must point out that Chrome doesn't beat Firefox in memory usage. I just swapped from a Linux Mint Debian installation, in which I used Firefox primarily, to a Sabayon Linux installation, in which I use Chrome primarily. Similar configurations, similar extensions, similar page load - very similar memory usage. I suppose that anyone could do that same test for themselves, and different people would get different results. Someone who loads a butt-ton load of Java apps in their browser may find that brand Z works better, while someone who gloms onto every Flash app will find that brand Y works best, while the other dude who runs a stripped down version with no extensions enabled finds that brand X is bestest and fastest.

For MY purposes, it actually seems that Firefox may have a very slight edge on Chrome for memory usage, but I'd have to do some double checking before I committed myself to that statement.

Mozilla did great but the battle is elsewhere

[ciaran_o_riordan]

> we came dangerously close to a world where Microsoft
> Internet Explorer was the only accepted web browser.

We dodged that bullet but now we're heading to a world where facebook.com plus a small few other sites are the internet.

It's not Mozilla's fault but, as Stallman says, freedom is about controlling your computing on your computer, so it's a real problem that a lot of computing is being done on Facebook's servers.

(That said, it would be useful if Mozilla Firefox did more to make its users aware of what free software is - such as putting a clearer link in the menu or in the About dialogue box.)