AfterDawn: News

Mozilla Firefox is now five years old

The popular open source browser Firefox celebrated its fifth birthday today, in version 3.5 and with over 24 percent market share, its largest tally ever.

Mozilla's Melissa Shapiro adds: Firefox started "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 hit over 1 billion downloads worldwide since then and continues to fight market share away from the clear leader, Internet Explorer.

"We've managed to keep Microsoft honest and forced them to release newer versions of their browsers," says Mozilla's Christopher Blizzard. "Firefox's presence was a large factor in Apple being able to ship a browser to its user base as the Mac came back to the market. We've made it possible for third party browser vendors like Google to enter the market."

Written by: Andre Yoskowitz @ 10 Nov 2009 2:28

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• 8 comments

• DXR88

  all is good and well,iremember when fire fox first came out it was the best. some where they must have scraped the old code, because now i cant stand fire fox.

  10.11.2009 12:32 #1

• glenmike

  Chrome is now my browser of choice but I still use Firefox daily for some things. I hardly ever use Internet explorer anymore.

  10.11.2009 13:24 #2

• oappi

  firefox also forced opera to ship their browser free.. thanks for that! It is my favorite browser, unfortunately firefox started to copy opera which i didnt like so much because i installed firefox to my parents computer because it didnt have tabs and complexity of opera. This doesn´t mean opera is hard to use (you just have to know how browser works), for example you might be embarrassed if you dont close opera tabs and when you next time open opera you see all of your porn sites you had open when closing opera =) or your computer gets really slow if you have hundreds of tabs open and don´t close them.

  10.11.2009 13:48 #3

• jony218

  I'm surprise this isn't the dominant browser. It's a rock solid product. If more people would use it, there would be less people posting on the virus/malware section. It gets better all the time.

  10.11.2009 23:04 #4

• cart0181

  If you hate the slow loading time of FF 3.5, I suggest FF Preloader. Tested working on XP Pro. It makes it load very quickly. Saved me from scrapping it altogether.

  10.11.2009 23:28 #5

• Mr-Movies

  Originally posted by DXR88: all is good and well,iremember when fire fox first came out it was the best. some where they must have scraped the old code, because now i cant stand fire fox.I feel the same way Fire Fox sucks now! Too bad it started out good. IE8 sucks also so if you use IE it is best to stay with IE7. I guess I'll stay with Avant borwser it's not perfect but works pretty good.
  
  Will there be a ten year celebration? :~)

  11.11.2009 08:05 #6

• alexeemo

  I've been using Firefox ever since it came out. I've never gone back to IE. I tried Opera for a while but it did nothing for me. Some of these comments have been harsh. I LOVE Firefox! It keeps getting better and better. I've been redirecting to attack sites before and Firefox warns me to get the heck out of Dodge! I have fiber optic broadband, 8 gigs of ram, and a quad core processor. It only takes seconds for Firefox to load for me and I never get bogged down by too many tabs open. Absolutely love it and I hope they keep up the good work.

  12.11.2009 12:15 #7

• cart0181

  Originally posted by alexeemo: I've been using Firefox ever since it came out. I've never gone back to IE. I tried Opera for a while but it did nothing for me. Some of these comments have been harsh. I LOVE Firefox! It keeps getting better and better. I've been redirecting to attack sites before and Firefox warns me to get the heck out of Dodge! I have fiber optic broadband, 8 gigs of ram, and a quad core processor. It only takes seconds for Firefox to load for me and I never get bogged down by too many tabs open. Absolutely love it and I hope they keep up the good work.I that a joke? Of course FF runs fast on your system.

  23.12.2009 04:01 #8