If you can believe it, the Mozilla Firefox browser is now 10 years old. Well, slightly older than that. Phoenix 0.1 (what it used to be called) was released 23-Sep-2002, which makes it 10 years and 2 days old at the time of this writing.
The browser name Phoenix was dropped for Firebird, then that was changed to Firefox, and that’s the name that stuck.
Firefox now vs. Firefox then
Firefox really didn’t start getting well-known until 2004. At that time the internet masses were using Internet Explorer 6 and really hating it. Why? Several reasons. IE6 had no tabs, tended to crash a lot and of course there was the spyware/malware issues. IE6 was just a bad, bad browser and everyone was very sick of it by the mid-2000s. When Firefox came along, it was a like a godsend because you could finally browse freely (at least for a few years) without worry of some stupid IE browser exploit turning your computer into a malware-ridden mess.
Today, as I’m sad to report, Firefox isn’t the champion browser it once was. Google Chrome continues to kick its ass left and right mainly for the simple reason Chrome is just plain faster. Firefox over the years has turned into a fat sloth of a browser. Even though many of the memory leak issues (arguably the biggest complaint Fx users have ever had) have been fixed in Firefox 15, that came way too late to the party.
Will Fx survive as further browser tech progresses? Yes, it will. But will it ever have a far-and-away lead over other browsers as far as market share is concerned? That I doubt.
In the spirit of competition however, I hope Fx sticks around for a good long time. Even though it’s a bit on the slow side compared to Chrome, nobody can deny it’s still a great web browser.
Like what you read?
If so, please join over 28,000 people who receive our exclusive weekly newsletter and computer tips, and get FREE COPIES of 5 eBooks we created, as our gift to you for subscribing. Just enter your name and email below:
Regrettably I defected to the Google Chrome camp almost a year ago
No need for regrets when it comes to software. Use what works and use it without apology. If Chrome works for you and you like it, stick with it.
It’s kind of funny looking back on the years of waving the Firefox flag.
Back in the 3.6 days when the Fx browser didn’t suck, yeah it was good to be an Fx fan back then.
Ah the good ole days.
These days I’m waving the Chrome/Chromium flag in anticipation of one day finding the corpse of IE.
I have been a long time user of Internet Explorer up to version 8. I disliked version 9 when it was launched because I never liked combining the search and address bar into one. The venerable IE8 is now old and tends to freeze in pages full of scripting (such as Facebook) and for this reason I am slowly transitioning to Firefox. Never had issues with any version of IE, never had any security issue even with version 6.