As Firefox turns 20, Mozilla ponders how to restore it to its former glory
November 12, 2024
Exactly 20 years ago, Mozilla started shipping version 1.0 of its Firefox browser. At the time, you could download it or buy a CD-ROM with a guidebook from Mozilla (or maybe get it on one of those free CDs that would come with many magazines at the time). Born out of the ashes of Netscape, Firefox would go on to gain well over 30% of global market share.
But that was followed by a period of stagnation, and after the arrival of the faster and lighter Google Chrome, Firefox slowly but surely lost market share. It didn’t help that Mozilla, at the time, seemingly prioritized everything but its browser, all while its mobile browser initiatives never quite took off.
Source: As Firefox turns 20, Mozilla ponders how to restore it to its former glory | TechCrunch
At the very first conference I helped run, just over 20 years ago, Firefox was still in Beta. We gave a bunch of software we thought our audience would benefit from on DVDs (it might have even been some sort of data CD format) including Firefox.
For those who believed in the importance of the open Web, as we and our audience did, the arrival of Firefox was a hugely important moment.
Apple had shipped Safari for the Mac the year before, and reignited some hope in a barren landscape where Internet Explorer then then utterly dominant browser had stagnated for years (on Windows. On the Mac, IE5 had delivered the first modern web browser and shown what a standards based web could look like).
But it was Firefox, and its rapid adoption that shifted the landscape. It saw Microsoft, pushed by competition in the space reinvest in Internet Explorer, and the Web, long moribund sputter into life once more.
The transition from desktop to the smart phone, where platforms locked out alternative browsers (and still essentially do to this day) coupled with the arrival of Chrome, and Google’s enormous resources probably meant the slow demise of Firefox was inevitable.
But the importance of Firefox can never be understated. Without it what would the Web look like? Without a vibrant Web, would the iPhone, whose key point of differentiation at launch was as a full fledged web experience, have been a success?
