Categories: Open SourceSoftware

Firefox Celebrates Fifth Birthday

The good folk over at Mozilla are celebrating the fact that five years ago to the day, it launched Firefox 1.0.

Firefox’s fifth birthday was celebrated in a blog on the Mozilla website. It noted that within four days of the initial release of the browser, more than one million people had downloaded it.

Now five years later, that number has swelled to over 330 million users worldwide. “Today Firefox ships in more than 70 languages and offers users more than 7,000 add-ons to help customise their browsing experience,” said the company.

“We’ve come so far in the past five years and we’re incredibly excited about the next five,” it added.

In order to celebrate, Mozilla communities are hosting parties all over the globe in a special campaign dubbed “Light the World with Firefox”. Full details are available here.

Internet Explorer has enjoyed years of domination after destroying Netscape’s lead in the mid 1990s, thanks to it being shipped with the Windows operating system. But Mozilla’s Christopher Blizzard took the opportunity in a blog to recap recent developments in the browser industry, including Microsoft offering a version of Windows 7 with an optional choice of which browser to install.

“We’ve managed to keep Microsoft honest and forced them to release newer versions of their browsers,” he wrote.”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. We’ve proven that people care about improving their experiences on the web. We’ve given over 330 million people the taste of what it’s like to use an open source product. And we’ve overseen the technical growth of the web through direct action and standardisation.”

Not bad work, all in all, for a five year old.

Tom Jowitt

Tom Jowitt is a leading British tech freelancer and long standing contributor to Silicon UK. He is also a bit of a Lord of the Rings nut...

Recent Posts

US Finalises $6.6bn Award For TSMC Arizona Plants

US Commerce Department finalises $6.6bn subsidy to TSMC for leading-edge chip plants in Arizona, as…

14 hours ago

SpaceX Prepares Tender Offer At $250bn Valuation

SpaceX to begin tender offer in December valuing company at $210bn, as Elon Musk's xAI…

15 hours ago

US Releases Security Advice For AI In Critical Infrastructure

US Department of Homeland Security releases advice for development and deployment of AI in critical…

15 hours ago

Lenovo Beats Estimates, Raises Projections As PC Sales Recover

World's biggest PC maker Lenovo beats sales predictions, raises forecast for 2025 as AI capabilities,…

16 hours ago

China Chip Production Slows Ahead Of New US Sanctions

Chip production slows in China in October ahead of expected export controls, while annual EV…

16 hours ago

Which? Seeks £3bn In Apple iCloud Competition Claim

Apple effectively locked 40 million UK users into iCloud and overcharged them, claims £3bn legal…

17 hours ago