Reading Firefox’s tenth birthday announcement this week brought back lots of memories for me.
When Firefox 1.0 was released ten years ago, I had been using the release candidate for about a month.
Firefox was refreshingly fast, easy to use, and developers were keen to hear what users thought of the new browser.
After frustrations with using Netscape and years of seeing Internet Explorer slow down, I was glad to have a streamlined browser that was user-focused.
It was a time when I was active in web development for local nonprofits and my church. I belonged to several online web communities, where we shared our experiences and excitement about the browser in online forums.
The month before the official release, along with other web designers and developers, I contributed money to Firefox for an ad to be placed in the New York Times promoting the new browser. The campaign reached its goal in three days, rather than the expected 10 days.
The new browser was such a huge success with users that Firefox predicted 10 percent of web surfers would be using Firefox within a year.
Tenth Birthday Release
Fast forward to 2014 and Firefox is celebrating its tenth birthday with a special anniversary version including:
- DuckDuckGo as a pre-installed search engine option
- Forget button allowing you to clear out recent activity for the past five minutes, two hours, or 24 hours
- Privacy Coach on Android
along with a new Firefox Developer Edition for web developers.
Happy birthday, Firefox!
Are you a Firefox user? Do you remember when it was first released?
