Little Browser Grows Up: Firefox at Five
November 9, 2004 was when Firefox was officially born. A look back on its fifth birthday.
Five years ago, Mozilla placed a full-page ad in the New York Times, which required more than $250,000 in donations, the donor names comprising the tiny print behind the Firefox logo. The ad ended up becoming burned indelibly into the minds of many users and showed what the community and the open source concept was capable of.
Firefox had emerged from the Mozilla project that combined a whole bundle of programs (browser, email program, editor and news reader) into one Mozilla Suite. As a separate program, the browser was to be significantly faster to start up and more efficient in delivering webpages.
Meanwhile Firefox has become a well established browser and is no longer the only competitor to Microsoft's Internet Explorer market leader. Firefox wanted to win back some of the market share that Microsoft gained by coupling its operating system with that of Netscape. Firefox 1.0 was also positioning itself against Apple's Safari browser.
According to Marketshare.hitslink.com, worldwide Firefox market share is currently at 24%, as compared to Internet Explorer's 65%, but growing. Chrome, Safari and Opera are each under 5% market share. Best wishes, Firefox, may you never become fat and lazy with age!
Subscribe to our Linux Newsletters
Find Linux and Open Source Jobs
Subscribe to our ADMIN Newsletters
Support Our Work
Linux Magazine content is made possible with support from readers like you. Please consider contributing when you’ve found an article to be beneficial.
News
-
Linux Kernel 6.17 is Available
Linus Torvalds has announced that the latest kernel has been released with plenty of core improvements and even more hardware support.
-
Kali Linux 2025.3 Released with New Hacking Tools
If you're a Kali Linux fan, you'll be glad to know that the third release of this famous pen-testing distribution is now available with updates for key components.
-
Zorin OS 18 Beta Available for Testing
The latest release from the team behind Zorin OS is ready for public testing, and it includes plenty of improvements to make it more powerful, user-friendly, and productive.
-
Fedora Linux 43 Beta Now Available for Testing
Fedora Linux 43 Beta ships with Gnome 49 and KDE Plasma 6.4 (and other goodies).
-
USB4 Maintainer Leaves Intel
Michael Jamet, one of the primary maintainers of USB4 and Thunderbolt drivers, has left Intel, leaving a gaping hole for the Linux community to deal with.
-
Budgie 10.9.3 Now Available
The latest version of this elegant and configurable Linux desktop aligns with changes in Gnome 49.
-
KDE Linux Alpha Available for Daring Users
It's official, KDE Linux has arrived, but it's not quite ready for prime time.
-
AMD Initiates Graphics Driver Updates for Linux Kernel 6.18
This new AMD update focuses on power management, display handling, and hardware support for Radeon GPUs.
-
AerynOS Alpha Release Available
With a choice of several desktop environments, AerynOS 2025.08 is almost ready to be your next operating system.
-
AUR Repository Still Under DDoS Attack
Arch User Repository continues to be under a DDoS attack that has been going on for more than two weeks.