Firefox turned one year old Wednesday, marking yet another milestone for the popular open-source browser. Firefox has grabbed 8.65 percent of the market and put a dent into Internet Explorer’s dominance, according to NetApplications’ October results. Elsewhere, Camino 1.0b1 was released.
Firefox Marks its First Year on the Net
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Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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…because I have been using “Firefox” and “Camino” for a lot more than a year. I know they were pre-1.0, but the engine itself has been stable for awhile.
Even so, congratulations Firefox! Browser of choice for me on Windows and Linux and BeOS, Camino on Mac OS X!!!!
You forgot Risc OS you insensitive clod!
Crongratulations to Mozilla for making a genuine difference on the Internet.
Turned one year old with the new name perhaps.. but it’s been around a lot longer than one year.
Tru dat. I remember using Phoenix on a USB drive my freshman year of college (fall 2002). I think they are referring to the release of version 1.0, which was a year ago today (Wednesday).
did i not hear this like a few days ago?
http://www.onestat.com/html/aboutus_pressbox40_browser_market_firef…
i thougth it was past 10%…more like 11%
OneStat unfortunatly measures all OSS Gecko browsers as one browser, and not Firefox alone (e.g. Epiphany, Mozilla and Camino are measured together). This is why it yield 11% on their stats and 8.6% on the other research firm’s stats.
I can’t imagine epiphany and galeon have any noticeable effect… But, Mozilla and firefox are, IMO, ok to count as one. I suppose galeon and epiphany are as well, but they’re like 0.25% together, rounded up, heavily.
I used it before that. It was perfectly good then, too bad it hasn’t gotten any faster.. Use Opera instead! Who wants to upgrade just to use a web browser?
You people should understand that till 1.0 it was classed as “Technology Preview” on mozilla site. The first official release came last year around this time – so its been 1 year since 1.0 not the start of phonenix or even firefox 0.7
even if ms bundles internet shit-xplorer with their operating system.
I don’t know about that. If the developers are going to insist that people use extensions to get the same level of functionality as people enjoy in Opera and various IE shell browsers natively, then they’re going to have to do some major quality control work.
For example, the release of Flash 8 broke something in Adblock, hence no Flash in Firefox w/Adblock installed for at least some of us. At least I knew enough to check Mozillazine to figure out why Flash suddenly stopped working. Try asking Joe Sixpack to do that. And don’t even get me started on the f**king extension breackage from release-to-release. I have decided to stick with 1.04 for the time being until 1.5 is released, because of how things went horribly wrong when I went from 1.01 to 1.02.
Anyway, IE7 will be out soon enough with tabbed browsing, security fixes, RSS, and a host of other features, so that’s going to take a bit of the wind out of Firefox’s sails. I guess it was pretty easy for Firefox to gain momentum when the market leader has been sitting on its ass for the past 6 years. But now the sleeping giant has awakened, and the giant quite pissed
Yes, but IE7 won’t have CSS support as many of us want and as it’s supposed to do: as in standards!
I hate people telling me IE7 will be better once it has tabs and RSS support… this is old news in Mozilla/Opera world!
hmm… it’s mostly mozilla and netscape users who use Firefox now, not IE users.
Who the hell modded this guy down?
He is right. As of now, pretty much everyone has heard about Firefox and those who liked it have already switched the only people who might switch to Firefox now, are the Netscape idiots, I mean users. Becuase it’s the “new” Netscape…
I can’t say I’m pleased with Firefox’s market share. It received heavy promotion at the beginning and I expected a lot more share then the miserably ~10% (give or take 2-3%). I guess that’s enough for people to start actually writing sites that work on all browsers (let’s forget about Opera for a second) or is that the Gecko’s quirks mode improving?
Use your brain – the total percentage use for IE has fallen – your claim is not logical. Just wishful thinking.
Edited 2005-11-10 04:51
I wouldnt say most people have heard of firefox. Most tech people have but not most people.
By that logic, you could say that it’s mostly Netscape users who use IE now, since most of us were probably using Netscape in 1995/96
…and nothing really changed. We’re still running 1.0x which was upgraded 7(?) due to many vulnerabilities that have popped up that were discovered in that year. Seems like Mozilla Found. is approaching their biggest rivals – they both need at least a year for a minor upgrade and they both have regular security vulnarbilities here and there.
Seriously though, I haven’t checked the FF 1.5 RC 1 yet, but I did run the 1.5 beta 2. Can someone please explain to me what the developers were doing for the past year or so? When I load up FF 1.5 I see zero improvements – a closer inspection shows that we now have a bloated menu, a “fast back” feature, a feature that saves you from 3 clicks (sanitize) and an update feature that should have been there since 0.x days.
I just hope I’m missing something, because if THAT is what the Mozilla guys have prepared to take on IE7 then they are in for a surprise.
I agree with your post, with the addition that most of the new features of Firefox 1.5 were already present in Mozilla 1.8 a YEAR ago. Maybe that time was spent bugfixing and optimization (specifically on Windows). To its credit, a lot of memory leaks have been fixed (again, on Windows) and startup time has improved somewhat.
I’d really like to see something like the FreeBSD and Gnome roadmaps play out for Firefox, where new releases are shipped out every six months. A year since a major release seems rather pathetic for a project of this magnitude and almost rivals the development cycle of K-Meleon.
BTW, I did not know Varg Vikerness posted here. Is he out of prison again?
I’d really like to see something like the FreeBSD and Gnome roadmaps play out for Firefox, where new releases are shipped out every six months. A year since a major release seems rather pathetic for a project of this magnitude
Well, as fragile as some of the extensions are and their tendancy to quit working whenever a new FF version comes out (especially a major update), I kinda like the infrequent releases. Contrast this with Opera, whwere the shit just works all the time
I have to agree. I’ve seen some pretty nasty conversations in the firefox bugzilla DB. Asa & Co., bickering with people who want some seemingly logical additions/changes to some of the smallest and littlest things in firefox.
To me however the biggest problem with firefox is simply how slow it is. It takes a lot of memory, on my system, with two tabs a few extensions and 512 mb ram, it’s taking the #1 spot in memory consumption at 61.5mb (windows xp).
I’m not really concerned about features, I like a slimmer browser, I’ll install extensions for the functionality I want. What I want right now is for an optimized and sped up firefox. One of the largest packages I’ve built on a linux system were firefox and thunderbird, the packages weighing in at a very large 30mb each, and these are bzipped! I’m not sure how much of this is actually compiled, but I’m sure a lot of it is, it takes a very long time to compile it compared to most other packages.
I still love firefox though, and wish it all the best. I’ve been using it since phoenix .6 and think that in time it’ll be a great browser someday.
61.5 mb? Count yourself lucky.
http://www.binarymelon.com/taskmgr.jpg
One of the largest packages I’ve built on a linux system were firefox and thunderbird, the packages weighing in at a very large 30mb each, and these are bzipped!
That’s because the source tree is shared for Firefox, Thunderbird, and SeaMonkey. So each time you download the source tarball, you are downloading components for all three programs, plus the Gecko engine, plus a bunch of other libraries. It’s entirely possible to build each program from the same source tree; why most distributions don’t include this as the default behavior is beyond me.
I suspected this, but wasn’t sure. Thanks for correcting me.
Beta2 was so crashy to be mostly unusable, but at least they get feedback on the crashes without much manual user effort.
RC1 is much better. RC2 is scheduled for Friday. Now 1.5 is using cairo for the backend instead of GDI on windows. The interesting thing about it is that it actually seems faster than 1.7. Go figure.
I believe it is actually just SVG that’s being switched to a Cairo backend (as opposed to the GDI+ one). The full Cairo backend will most likely not happen by 1.5.
There’s experimental cairo builds on the Mozilla FTP; but it’s no where near becoming default. For one thing, it can’t render gmail correctly yet
I believe it is actually just SVG that’s being switched to a Cairo backend (as opposed to the GDI+ one). The full Cairo backend will most likely not happen by 1.5.
Hehe, ok. That makes some sense. I thought it strange that Cairo on windows would be so snappy at this stage of its development.
Congratulations to Mozilla Foundation
From under under dog to browser #2 (atleast on Windows) is a very good acheivment
Congratulation to developers from being responsible to bringing out changes in world of web browsers
(IE7, Opera going free etc)
Keep up good work
from the time Firefox was called Phoenix and Firebird? Or, is it only counting since it changed it’s name to Firefox? I was just wondering.
There are about three comments about this, all of them before your comment. Use your brain, what big event happened with Firefox one year ago? If you can’t answer that then you’re probably more than a little slow.
I ran Firebird and was disappointed when they had to change the name to Firefox. Guess it didn’t matter. Somehow I always thought names were more important than that.
Keep up the good ‘word’ Firefox.
A fan
Forget about improvements to Firefox, instead get ready for google integration. If you want improvements, check out one of Firefox’s derivatives. Sad but true.
I’ve been using Firefox since .7, but maybe it is a victim of its own success. Patch style updates and draggable tabs do seem cool but where is the innovation? Are innovation and market share always inversely related?
Geez…everyone…we are tallking about a browser here….everyone is sooooo serious about all of this. Firefox is fine! Are you helping to code it? I’m not…so I don’t have ANYTHING to complain about.
It’s about choice. Here we have a great browser that runs on just about anything….common over all platforms.
Opera is fine too…we have choices. Internet Explorer works fine in Windows and will always work fine (Active X being a weak, but essential component of how it works notwithstanding), and IE7 will probably be really nice.
But Firefox DID come around and here we have a great browser. Perfect? Of course not. Progressing as fast as some want here? Maybe not. But geez…people…this is FREE software and it works very nicely indeed!
Opera’s move to totally free was part of the Firefox phenomenon too. Opera is a great broswer as well…me? I use all of them, depending on what I’m doing.
Congratulations, Mozilla Foundation. Keep up the good work.
Better security
More features
Less memory necessary
Less disk space necessary
Better application
The new check update system works great and it is really efficient. Notable difference is the reduced memory consumption (25MB) in a 1GB memory RAM system.