A Short History of Mozilla Firefox
Mozilla & Phoenix: The Beginning
NCSA Mosaic 0.5 launched its browser in 1992.
This was before the internet became mainstream, but amongst users, this browser gained traction. A little after this, Jim Clark and Marc Andreessen founded Netscape. The company’s browser overcame Mosaic in terms of popularity and had a range of features that made it the superior browsing option at the time. Microsoft “reduced it to ashes” with the coming of Internet Explorer come the 2000s.
The Mozilla Project launched in 1998, to clean up and fix the open-source Netscape code. However, the code was messy, so three developers (David Hyatt, Joe Hewitt, and Blake Ross) began development on a browser they called “Phoenix”; they launched the first version in 2002. It had features like tab browsing and a pop up blocker built in that Internet Explorer didn’t but Internet Explorer still had 90% of users on it.
A different company IBPhoenix wasn’t happy about the shared name, so Mozilla changed the browser to Firefox in 2004.
Firefox: The Upward Arrow & “Golden Age”
By 2007, Firefox had grown a good deal in stocks and became a promising source of technological innovation. For Mozilla, the sun didn’t set and the skies were clear.
In 2008, AOL announced the end of Netscape, so users flooded to Firefox. Mozilla Foundation was a nonprofit, but donations weren’t sustainable, so they became the Mozilla Corportation. Growing bigger and bigger, Firefox was still using Google for their search engine. This went on until 2014, despite Mozilla being named the most trusted Internet company in privacy. Distro’s Projects finds that they were paid 1,000,000,000$ in those 9 years, so profits were high, although it created distrust between Mozilla and its users. Although Microsoft partnered with Mozilla to make Firefox part of Windows Vista, so it didn’t harm the company too much at the time.
Google Chrome: The Forever Big Bad
Priya, why is there an anime girl in this article?
A popular Twitter Artist, Merryweathery, wrote a webcomic called “Internet Explorer.” Who’s the villain? Google Chrome.
In fact, in this story, Chrome overtakes every other browser, including the side character Firefox.
In 2010, Google Chrome surpassed Firefox in users and Mozilla began their decline in the browser competition. Even in the comical story, Chrome fulfills the role of being the strongest, dominant villain.
Down, Down, Down…
Mozilla launches the Firefox OS project to revive the company and browser.. However, the OS was discontinued. The CEO entered himself into controversy over political donations, and his open disproval for gay marriage rights. Shortly after, Brendan Eich resigned as CEO. For a short time, Yahoo became the search engine for the Firefox browser, but they ultimately returned to Google.
The webcomic does a great job fanaticizing the events around the browser revolution, but Firefox would be subordinate or reliant on Google in some way if Merryweather was to make it more “accurate” (it’s a fictional webcomic so who cares).
Gecko & the Quantum Project: Here since the beginning
Ever since the start, Gecko has been a key piece in the Mozilla project, however, the engine had a lot of issues. So, Mozilla opened the Quantum Project in order to fix Gecko. Servo, a different browser engine made by Mozilla, was to be combined with Gecko and implemented into Firefox. A web engine, as this source details further.
The logo for the project.
“Firefox 57 was released on November 14, 2017, with the name Firefox Quantum. ZDNet dubbed it a “comeback” following years of falling market share against Google Chrome.” However, let’s take a look at the Firefox shares for that time.
Firefox is the line that is highlighted.
Yeah, not much happened. They weren’t the worst of the browsers, but clearly, Google Chrome was destroying the competition.
The Leftovers: Where is Firefox now?
After releasing more services for Firefox unsuccessfully, Mozilla has continued to decline and release updates & bugs fixes. The browser has people hoping for it, but the future looks dim for the once-promising product. Firefox is still around as one of the more secure browsers and isn’t one of the many Chromium-based browsers (although they still use Google as their search engine.) That’s all for this history lesson! Big thanks to the sources all linked below. Thank you for reading :)