After 5 Years on Web, Firefox Preps for Next Round
Vladimir Vuki?evi? was working at the Mozilla office when Firefox was first released into the wild. “All of our servers melted instantly,” Vuki?evi? says. “We spent an hour trying to get the downloads back up.” Indeed, the anticipation around the release of Firefox 1.0 on November 9, 2004 — five years ago Monday — was electric.
Mozilla had already produced its own eponymous browser based on open source code in 2002, but it was largely considered a failure. Firefox was the organization’s great re-do, and its second attempt to unseat its biggest nemesis, Microsoft Internet Explorer.
A half-decade later, Firefox is no longer a scrappy upstart but a dominant player. Old rival IE still commands around 60 percent of the market share, but close to a quarter of the web now uses Firefox — a formidable number which speaks to its success as an open source project. At a time when nobody wanted to go toe-to-toe with Microsoft, thousands of disparate programmers rose to the challenge, landing Firefox on the short list of other open source triumphs like Wikipedia, Ubuntu Linux, WordPress and the web itself.
