Happy 5th Birthday to Firefox

[RoyGBiv]

Five years seems like such a long time ago. I started posting in this forum when Firefox was on version 0.9 and had been using it since version 0.6. Today it seems like I've been using it forever.

There have been some bumps along the road, and regardless of whether you use it, we should all be thankful to the Mozilla Foundation from at the very least helping break the stranglehold IE 6 had on the web.

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.

By Ryan Paul

Five years ago today, Mozilla announced the official release of Firefox 1.0. The open source Web browser has come a very long way since then and has achieved a level of popularity that few would have imagined possible. The success of Firefox and Mozilla's unwavering commitment to open Web standards has helped to usher in a new era of vibrance and diversity in the browser market. To commemorate Firefox's fifth anniversary, we are going to take you back in time for a look at some of our classic coverage of the popular browser.

More at Ars Technica. . .

[pokerfan]

1. Happy birthday!

I started using Firefox when it was still (briefly) called Firebird. Never looked back.

[charlie]

2. Yes, many thanks to Mozilla

But, even bigger props to the guys who made Firefox happen. Everyone bitched at Moz for years for farting around with their application suite, when what was needed NOW was a browser (I was using Kmeleon for a while, because it was the only way I could get a non-sucky Gecko based browser). The window of opportunity was closing, they were already behind from chucking Navigator code, but they just wouldn't listen -- "You don't get it, it's a platform, not a mere browser". It took the Netscape 6 fiasco to wake them up. To their credit, the turnabout was pretty quick, Seamonkey was backburnered as soon as Firefox was viable.

Thanks to Microsoft for getting fat and smug in the interlude between browser wars. We wouldn't be here without their years of desultory upgrades. Announcing that IE would cease being a standalone and only be available through Windows updates was an especially nice move.

Thanks to Opera for never quitting. Everybody's favorite browser that they don't use stayed plucky and learned the big boys a thing or two about the kind of innovation that can come from a small shop. The Version 7 rewrite was a jaw-dropper, the day their showroom Beetles were suddenly replaced with Porsches.

And a hat tip to Google and Apple for joining the fray (plus, KDE, whose KHTML finally became so good Apple borrowed it). Having a half dozen major players has given us a competitive donnybrook and thrown the pace of innovation into overdrive.

So, yay for us! Happy birthday, Firefox.

[madokie]

3. Happy birthday firefox

I'm a little late to the party but all the pretty girls aren't gone yet so I'm going to hang around a while