Firefox over the years has garnered millions of fans around the world and has a thriving developer community. Firefox is celebrating five years of success today, part of the success of the browser can also be attributed to the developers who developed thousands of add-ons for the browser.
On November 9, 2004 Firefox was released, and with in first four days of launch 1 million people downloaded the browser. Melissa Shapiro says Firefox 1.0 is released “with belief that, as the most significant social and technological development of our time, the Internet is a public resource that must remain open and accessible to all.”
Firefox has now 300 million users worldwide, Firefox still lags behind IE but it is the preferred browser for many of us.
Firefox 3.0 is released in June 2008 and hit 8.3 million downloads in 24 hours. Firefox 3.5 released this June came with some new features like Private browsing and geo location features.
Firefox has completed successful Five years and what about the next five years?. Christopher Blizzard at mozilla hacks talks about the future of Firefox.
Over the next five years everyone can expect that the browser should take part in a few new areas – to act as the user agent it should be. Issues around data, privacy and identity loom large. You will see the values of Mozilla’s public benefit mission reflected in our product choices in these areas to make users safer and help them understand what it means to share data with web sites.
Expect to see big changes in the video space. HTML5-based video and open video codecs are starting to appear on the web as web developers make individual choices to support a standards-based, royalty-free approach. Expect to see changes in the expectations around the licensing of codecs.
And over the next five years mobile will play an increasingly important role in our lives, and in the future of the web. The decisions of users, carriers, governments and the people who build phones will have far-reaching effects on this new extension to the Internet and how people will access information for decades to come.
