The open-source browser Mozilla Firefox is celebrating its second anniversary: it is ten years ago that the first version of the browser with the codename ‘Phoenix’, 0.1, online came. The test phase of the Phoenix took some time, since Firefox 1.0 came out in 2004.
The 0.1 version of Firefox was posted online on the 23 september 2002. The browser was developed by Mozilla, an organization that was originally founded for the development of the open source become Netscape Navigator. Later Mozilla a stand-alone project and its Mozilla Internet Suite remained in certain circles popular.
The package, however, was quite heavy, and so developed Mozilla’s lightweight Firefox as an alternative. Originally, the browser through life like the Phoenix. The Linux version of Phoenix 0.1 is 10MB, the Windows variant is 8.3 MB. A Mac OS version was later developed.
The first final version of Firefox came some time later, in 2004. Within a few years, picked up Firefox a large piece of the market share of the then dominant Internet Explorer browser, which for years remained stuck on version 6. Firefox showed a lot of people get acquainted with novelties like tabs in the browser and rss feeds in the bookmarks bar.
Firefox still has a significant market share, but has now been surpassed by Chrome from Google, which according to a lot of people start faster and pages faster to load. Firefox presently has versions for Windows, Linux, Mac OS X and Android.
