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.