Granular Newsletter: July'07

The Story of Firefox

The Time Machine section takes you back into the past on an adventurous ride into the pages of the history, specifically the Linux and Open Source history.

Mozilla Firefox needs no introduction. Perhaps it is the most popular and most successful web browser of all times. Today most of us cannot live without it. But how did it come into existence? What made this browser such a huge success? We discuss these questions and even more about Firefox in this article.

Prior to the year 2003, the two reigning web browsers used to be Netscape Navigator and Microsoft Internet Explorer. In fact, Navigator dominated the usage share (about 85% in the mid-1990s) and was considered far ahead of Internet Explorer in terms of browsing experience and features. But as a result of the first browser war^[10], Netscape Navigator eventually lost to Internet Explorer as IE's development was being funded heavily by Microsoft for its rigorous development.

In early 1998, Netscape started an open source project with the name Mozilla to help them build the next versions of the Navigator browser with source code based on Mozilla. Soon Netscape also made the previous version of Communicator and Navigator at that time (Netscape Communicator 4.0) open source in the hope that it would help them reclaim lost grounds. But even this did not help.

In late 1998, AOL^[11] acquired the Netscape company and the further releases of Netscape's browser were made under AOL. In 2003, AOL disbanded Netscape and most of the programmers of the Netscape team were laid-off. Till this time, the usage share of Netspace had fallen from 85% (in the mid-1990s) to a mere 1%.

Following the disbanding of Netscape, the Mozilla project continued its operations independently and was soon renamed to Mozilla Foundation. Many laid-off members of the Netscape team joined Mozilla Foundation. Based on the Gecko rendering engine (which Netscape developed at the time of formation of Mozilla project), the Mozilla Foundation launched an all new browser called Phoenix in 2002. But due to some trademark issues with an existing company called Phoenix Technologies, Phoenix was renamed to Firebird. Again, this name arouse confusions with Firebird free database software project (not owned by Mozilla). So finally this browser was renamed to what we call it now -- the Mozilla Firefox browser.

Soon Firefox replaced the Mozilla Suite as the flagship product of the Mozilla project, under the direction of the Mozilla Foundation. And now, there is no looking back for Firefox as it maintains a respectable position in the user share. According to W3Counter, 25.06% of the world's web surfers use a version of Firefox as of June 20, 2007. As of 30th June 2007, Firefox has been downloaded more than 368 million times till now which is a huge figure and a record in itself.

Some notable features of Firefox include:

Tabbed browsing
Secure browsing
Superb web page rendering using the Gecko engine
Integrated RSS feed aggregator
Extensively customizable interface with the help of themes, extensions
Integrated search engine
Easy to get used-to interface

Here is a list of the code-names of different vesions of Firefox till now:

Firefox pre-1.0 -- Phoenix
Firefox 1.0 -- Deer Park
Firefox 2.0 -- Bon Echo
Firefox 3.0 -- Gran Paradiso

The latest stable version of Firefox is 2.0.0.4 (pre-installed in Granular v0.90).

[ Some facts from wikipedia.org ]