Mozilla Firefox Birthday: Five Today

Who would have thought that it has been five years since Mozilla launched Firefox 1.0, in that time we have seen the open source Web browser become more popular as it increases its market share. It is the popularity of Firefox that has helped open up the browser market, which most would admit is for the better.

When Firefox launched five years ago, it was seen as an alternative to Mozilla Suite’s browser, it was meant to be called Phoenix as it was seen as a rebirth. According to Ars Technica, the very first Phoenix binaries were way back in 2002, much earlier than many of us would have thought.

There were those on Ars Technica back in 2003 who had thought the idea of tabbed browsing was not a good idea, how stupid must they feel right now. Other features of the early Phoenix build included popup blocking and autocompletion.

All the mainstream features that we see on today’s browsers were a vision all those years ago, but a vision that was first seen by Mozilla browser developers. Phoenix had to be changed to Firebird and then Firefox due to trademark conflicts. Read the history of Firefox from Ars Technica.

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