Today is Mozilla Firefox’s 5th birthday. The project by Mozilla was launched on November 5th 2004, with Firefox 1.0 this became a hit among users and developers alike.
5 years later and Firefox boasts over 330 million users, thousands of plug-ins, and a busy developer community. It holds a quarter of the browser market.
Christopher Blizzard over at hacks.mozilla.org has some idea about the future. Sums it up in 3 words, privacy, video, and mobile. From the blog post:
“Over the next five years everyone can expect that the browser should take part in a few new areas – to act as the user agent it should be. Issues around data, privacy and identity loom large. You will see the values of Mozilla’s public benefit mission reflected in our product choices in these areas to make users safer and help them understand what it means to share data with web sites.
Expect to see big changes in the video space. HTML5-based video and open video codecs are starting to appear on the web as web developers make individual choices to support a standards-based, royalty-free approach. Expect to see changes in the expectations around the licensing of codecs.
And over the next five years mobile will play an increasingly important role in our lives, and in the future of the web. The decisions of users, carriers, governments and the people who build phones will have far-reaching effects on this new extension to the Internet and how people will access information for decades to come.”
“Light the World with Firefox”, Find out more at www.spreadfirefox.com/5years/en-US/.
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I am a dedicated FF user since 3.0. I tried FF 1.0 based on some computer magazine reviews and I wasn't impressed. At the time there decent alternative shell browsers built on top of MS IE. Wanting to break away from IE because I wanted more control over my browser I switched to FF 3.0 and never looked back. I have tried the Alpaha build of FF 3.6 and the prebuild of FF 3.7 and all I can is wow. They are built on the new Gieko engine and they are fast.
Personally I would love to get my hands on FF 4.0 but no trunk builds are available yet.