'After Five Years on the Web Firefox Preps for... - Mozilla Firefox

"MOUNTAIN VIEW, California — Vladimir Vukićević was working at the Mozilla office when Firefox was first released into the wild. “All of our servers melted instantly,” Vukićević says. “We spent an hour trying to get the downloads back up.” Indeed, the anticipation around the release of Firefox 1.0 on November 9, 2004 — five years ago Monday — was electric. Mozilla had already produced its own eponymous browser based on open source code in 2002, but it was largely considered a failure. Firefox was the organization’s great re-do, and its second attempt to unseat its biggest nemesis, Microsoft Internet Explorer. A half-decade later, Firefox is no longer a scrappy upstart but a dominant player. Old rival IE still commands around 60 percent of the market share, but close to a quarter of the web now uses Firefox — a formidable number which speaks to its success as an open source project. At a time when nobody wanted to go toe-to-toe with Microsoft, thousands of disparate programmers rose to the challenge, landing Firefox on the short list of other open source triumphs like Wikipedia, Ubuntu Linux, WordPress and the web itself. Successes aside, Firefox is now at a tipping point. Five years ago, it was all about beating Microsoft. Left unchecked, the company was free to dictate what shape the web would take. Firefox’s popularity created a new market for web standards and forced Redmond to take open-web technologies seriously. Now, Firefox faces a bigger struggle. It needs to continue to innovate and remain relevant in an ever-changing, and ever-more-competitive, landscape. “When it was just us and Microsoft, the story was very simple — it was the little guy versus the giant,” says Mozilla’s Mike Beltzner, who oversees Firefox’s development. “Now you’ve got heavy hitters like Microsoft, Google and Apple all competing, which make the stories a lot more interesting.” The web itself has changed significantly in the last five years, as well. It’s no longer just a network of... more... - sofarsoShawn