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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.
Well, at least we can celebrate the first years. Before the new versioning system and adding everything but your mom's dong instead of letting addons do the work.
Sorry to say, but Firefox is kind of irrelevant these days.
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.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
Today my dog released a turd on your doorstep.
UNITE with the Campaign for a Free Internet because today, our future begins with tomorrow!
and, like Internet Exploder and Fuckle Chrap, uses ninety times the fucking memory. Just use a text based browser like Lynx instead, uses almost no memory or processor resources and is virtually invulnerable to malware.
keep up the good work, gentlemen.
to that 'lean' browser of yesteryear?
Baby take my to download the obs&essed - giive
It's an updater.
FF1.5 was and still is the only good version.
After that it went downhill with them adding crap features, bloating the hell out of the browser and breaking the API EVERY SINGLE GOD DAMN TIME. THEY STILL DO THIS NOW. LEARN WHAT AN API IS YOU MORONS, APIS AREN'T SUPPOSED TO BREAK, THAT IS THEIR POINT!
I gave up caring about their nonsense when Chromium became stable enough. (v0.3, still on my desktop for some reason)
I still have one installed, webdev, etc.
The only thing I mainly use it for is for a couple extensions that are not on Chromium, such as mass downloader or interception of data.
It is an absolute chore dealing with their crap all the time. No wonder every damn developer has left for other browsers. Thanks Mozilla, not only did you ruin your browser you went against your original aim, to create competition. You shot yourself in the foot so much that everyone abandoned you. Genius.
Pfft. Firefox 2.0.0.x was pretty good, it was with 3.x that it got slower and I eventually switched to Chrome for better speed.
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
They got off track when the goals stopped being about speed, standards, stability and security.
At that point it became just another app.
Almost every new iteration of FF removes or detrimentally alters a feature that people use and rely on.
It's really starting to piss me off as I have to find extensions or workarounds to replace the functions they keep taking away.
The most recent annoyance is to the find-in-page function, before it was well laid out and I had absolutely no issues with it, but now it's ruined, the close bar X button has been moved from immediately left of the search box to the right edge of the bar which is really far away on a widescreen display, the search next/prev boxes have been reversed and no longer have Next and Previous words on them which makes them a smaller target for your mouse pointer, and the Highlight All and Match Case buttons have also been moved to the right edge of the bar.
Seriously Mozilla, what the fuck?
Take a look at these numerous different measures of browser usage shares: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Browser_share#Historical_usage_share
The most obvious trend concerning Firefox is the steady downward slide in its usage share. It has gone from over 30% of the market back in 2010 to down near 15% these days.
Firefox 4.0 was released in March of 2011, although it was obvious before then that bad decisions were being made, and would continue to be made. This is when people in the know moved on to other browsers, followed by stragglers.
The decline is very much due to how they've treated their users like absolute rubbish. They've focused on stupid UI changes, adding useless features and functionality that nobody wants, and removing very critical functionality that many users depend on, all while ignoring the pleas of the community to fix some very major issues like Firefox's slow performance and unbelievable memory usage.
People aren't dumb. They know when they're getting shit upon, and they'll deal with it. That's why they've mainly moved to Chrome. It may have a shitty UI, but at least it's fast, at least it doesn't use far too much memory, and at least Google manages to not piss off most users with each release.
When a product loses 50% of its usage share over just a few years, it'll most likely become a dead product within a few more. I hate to say it, but Firefox is on its way out. The numbers show it, and there's nothing being done to reverse this trend.
Seamonkey
-Download Size 20mb
-Browser, Mail, News, IRC
-Feature Rich
-Fully Customizable Interface
-Lower Memory Use
Firefox
-Download Size 31.2mb (Aurora, Firefox uses stub installer, but was over 30mb)
-Browser
-"Streamlined" Cut Down Feature Set (With more features cut all the time)
-Fully Customizable Interface
-Higher Memory Use (I have seen 50% more memory used than Seamonkey with same pages loaded)
On the other hand, that API issue is serious.
For a lot of time, I were using Firefox instead of Chrome because of my NetBanking plugin. Chrome was a bit faster than Firefox at that time, but not that faster - and I enjoyed my Firefox add-ons.
And then, suddenly, Mozilla start to spit new versions in a crazy way, and my NetBanking stop working after every single new (sub)version of Firefox. Hell by hell, I decided Chrome's "hell" was a bit more worthy - at least, I got some faster renderings and the Google's account syncing. Little time after, my NetBanking plugin for Chrome became more stable than the Firefox version, and the rest is history.
Lisias@Earth.SolarSystem.OrionArm.MilkyWay.Local.Virgo.Universe.org
2 was by far the slowest Firefox in history. It also had that annoying misfeature where it grabbed all the memory in the system expecting that it could dole it out to other application as needed.
3 had an enormous speed boost over that, and it's been getting steadily better since then. HOWEVER, the for the last few versions having Firebug running causes serious slowdowns. That will be fixed in time, but until then I strongly recommend disabling it and using the (excellent) build-in dev tools.
...and it STILL can't print many web sites correctly.
This is beyond frustrating. I print many web pages to PDFs on a weekly basis for research purposes, and I have to remember which sites (like The Guardian's) never print, as well as check the output of every single attempt so I know when I have to fire up IE to get a readable, complete PDF of a freaking web page.
Here's a hint, Mozilla: If IE does something as simple as printing a web page vastly better than your browser, and it's been that was for several years, then your priorities are severely screwed up.
Mozilla/firefox has been perverted, corrupted.
"You can haz many many $$. Just insert some more tracking hooks for, you know, advertising and whatnot. Here, take a look at dis nifty spec for etags." [Wink-wink. Jingles the coins in the pocket.]
Like adding support for vertical writing for which people have been asking for 10 years, instead of tweaking and tweaking the UI and worrying about version numbers.
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=145503
Yes, this bug is older than Firefox 1.0 itself...
Maybe I'm getting hung up on the wrong thing here, but how the fuck do you measure how "fun" a web-browsing experience is? What does that actually mean? What is it that makes Firefox fundamentally more enjoyable during recreational use that, say, Chrome/Opera/Safari/IE/etc. are missing?
I'm fine with the rest of this and happy birthday to Firefox and all, but what is it that actually makes for a "fun" browsing experience, other than the specific websites that I choose to use?
Let q be a radix > 1. I am in ur base-q, killing 10 d00ds.
It went from Phoenix to Firebird, then to Firefox
> 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.)
Expert in software patents or patent law? Contribute to the ESP wiki!
Chrome's tab-model is a literal Fork-Bomb. If I have to explain it to you, you need to get off /.
Unlike Firefox where it JIT loads tabs as you need them. Try restoring a 30+ multi-tab session with Chrome, good-luck.
If you don't like the spiked dildo in your ass... STOP PUTTING IT THERE. We don't care about your butt hurt. Use a different browser and STFU. You're like a one of those small yippy dogs that barks incessantly no matter how many times you throw it against wall it just won't shut up! On and on and on with high pitched yipping. For god's sake give it a rest. 9 years of bitching hasn't worked. Prove you're smarter than a fucking bitch and move on.
When they decided to start hiding or removing useful settings while adding so much bloatware into it that they might as well have renamed it FireIE 6.0, I quit using it for daily browsing habits.
Now that it is up to version 25+ (which is fucking stupid in its own right, trying to play version catch-up with Google just because), I still find that I don't use it for anything but Twitch.tv and Disqus.
For some reason the chat interface for Twitch never loads in Chrome no matter what I do, and Disqus comments never load in Chrome no matter what I do.
Not that I interactively use the Twitch chat, since it requires a Facebook account to post, but I can at least read the commentary and maybe send the developers a more full-fledged response via email when I am watching something from Digital Extremes or Trion for instance.
As for Disqus, I can't figure out what it is - it may be Chrome mangling the Disqus cookies in some way or hating the number of redirects the Disqus system itself uses when logging in and loading comment sections, but it just sits and spins and never loads. Loads instantly on IE10 or Firefox though (yes, I use Windows 7 exclusively at the moment).
@Mindless Drivel: 100% of Twitter posts ever Tweeted.