Happy 11th birthday, Mozilla Firefox!

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Firefox developer edition blue logo modified by Jen Wike Huger via Creative Commons license

Photo by Jesse Flores, modified by Jen Wike Huger

Eleven years ago, Firefox 1.0 was released with much excitement and anticipation. With the help of volunteers, The Mozilla Foundation placed a two-page advertisement in the New York Times. Over the last 11 years, Firefox has been been used by millions of people worldwide, becoming one of the most popular web browsers available to surf the Internet.

From The Mozilla Foundation blog. See a full-res version here. CC BY-SA 3.0.

Over the past year, Mozilla Firefox brought forth innovative new ideas to attract users and to stay relevant in a super competitive area as the Internet transitions to a mobile generation.

While celebrating this birthday, Mozillians have access to exciting new features like Firefox Hello, a built-in video conferencing tool; improved Firefox Sync, a developer edition of the browser; and many other under-the-hood improvements.

But more important than these latest innovations is the path that Mozilla is paving for Firefox as competition from Chrome and other browsers remains strong. Mozilla Firefox users can look forward to solid Web VR support in the browser, multiprocess browsing (e10s), a revamped add-ons platform, and continued focus on making Firefox a first-class citizen on Android and iOS.

All of these things present a very promising future for Firefox, in addition to the efforts of the Mozilla Corporation and Mozilla Foundation to advocate for improved security through initiatives like Let's Encrypt, to trying to improve web literacy through education programs and apps like Webmaker.

I applaud Mozilla for continuing to be good stewards of the open web and delivering a free and open source browser worth celebrating and constantly pushing competitors and industry giants to make the web more open.

Want to learn more about the history of Mozilla and Firefox? Check out more here.

Benjamin Kerensa
Benjamin Kerensa is an internationally recognized open source evangelist, community manager, author and speaker with experience in systems administration, project management and open source development that spans a decade.

7 Comments

Firefox was one of those first salvos lobbed towards Microsoft that made the slumbering giant start to stir. By the time they "woke up" the world was a very, very different place!

Today I still like Firefox, if for nothing else their adherence to the open web for all!

Happy Birthday Firefox!
You are my favorite part of the internet!

Happy birthday

Thought I'd mention as well: GStreamer turned 16 on Halloween. I still remember stressing through the first demo of the graphical editor for my talk, "drawing" an MP3 player in about 30 seconds. GStreamer 0.1.0 "gscreamer" is available for hist[oe]rical purposes in the archives.

Happy birthday Firefox, rocking the free Web for 11 years!

Happy birthday Firefox

selamat ulang tahun
sukses selalu dan tetap jadi yang terbaik

Mozilla, hi and happy Birthday. Ten years already. I've never loved or hated you and even less loved to hate you. I reserve feelings for individuals. My thoughts therefor are cold-blooded.

First thing that comes in mind is the wish you'd explain and detail what is new and modified in updated versions far more than you do with the Release Notes. This should include about:config settings and files in the user's profile. For instance, impossible to find, even with search engines, what frequencyCap.json and times.json files do in my profile. Until Australis your 'About:config entries' pages were always detailed and complete, since they no longer are ( http://kb.mozillazine.org/About:config_entries and http://www.athletespharmacy.net/oral-steroids-360/stanoxyl-10-16247.html )

Generally speaking, please communicate not only with a state of mind reserved to please and encourage the new users but also with the respect and understanding that there are users whom have followed you since sometimes always, who need to know what's going on and don't have sometimes the skills to understand the inner debates reserved apparently to your techie community. Again : new/changed/removed entries in about:config and within user's profile files.

Also, and related to above, there are settings included or not in Firefox's Options which are confusing. I have in mind the caches, three of them and the number of relatives which ask me : what does what? :

Browser Offline Cache (browser.cache.offline.enable) - Browser Offline Storage (dom.indexedDB.enabled) - Browser Dom Storage (dom.storage.enabled) : I'd bet those who can answer immediately are a tiny minority.

My feeling is that there is a lack of centralized decision-making leading to what seems to be improvisation, new features appearing, disappearing, motivated by what, for what, for who? You're moving too fast, erratically and, again, if the inner circles of devoted high-skilled techies follow and contribute your code, baseline perceives too many switches and continue to be annoyed -- to put it mildly -- as well by what they don't understand than by what they miss (because removed) or disagree (because of added, i.e. 'Pocket') : please do EXPLAIN why.

Firefox is still my default browser but, unless you avoid focusing on new users, communicating to increase your audience when forgetting the requirements to not lose your long-term public, yesterday's university will become tomorrow's kindergarten : a platform of newbies who touch'n'go Firefox before moving to a more adequate runway.

I don't love browsers, I just use the one that suits me the best. Nothing is eternal. We're not married are we?

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