Firefox celebrates five years as a Web browser
Five years ago today, on November 9, 2004, Mozilla launched Firefox 1.0 and the Web browser has never looked back. In that five years Firefox has grown from an open source product for nerds and geeks to a mainstream product with 330 million users worldwide and a 20-25 percent market share. So, what does the future hold for Firefox?
Five years ago the Internet was a wildly different place than it is now. There was no YouTube, no Facebook and Twitter, no Blorge for that matter. The Web browser market was also very different. Q2 of 2004 saw Microsoft’s Internet Explorer hit its highest market share ever, with a whopping 95.04 percent of Web users sticking to the IE that came pre-installed with their PC.
By Q4 2004 that market share was dropping thanks to new competition in the form of Mozilla Firefox. The browser was initially an experimental offshoot of the Mozilla project which at the time consisted of a full suite of products including a mail client, a feed reader, and IRC client and a web page creator. It was an immediate success, with one million downloads in the first four days of its release.
Five years later and we’re now on Firefox 3.5.5. The look and feel of the browser have improved a great deal, and the 7,000 add-ons developed for Firefox have improved the usability factor and number of features an inordinate amount.
And yet, things aren’t all rosy. A report today suggests that Firefox now leads the browser pack for vulnerabilities, with 44 percent of all those reported hitting the Mozilla browser. And then there is the competition such as Safari, Opera, and Chrome. Google’s Chrome browser is a particular threat as it feels like the natural successor to those ready to move away from Firefox for whatever reason.
I’m sure Firefox will be around for another five years and be celebrating its 10th birthday on this day in 2014. However, Mozilla needs to really pull out all the stops in order to keep chipping away at Internet Explorer while also seeing off the challenge from Chrome. Oh, and fixing those vulnerabilities more quickly and efficiently wouldn’t hurt either.
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