This week, Mozilla Firefox celebrates it’s 6th birthday.
Created by Dave Hyatt and Blake Ross as an experimental project, the first version of the browser, Firefox 1.0 was released on November 9, 2004. The free, open source web browser and has since grown to become the second most widely used browser, serving 30% of the web browser market worldwide.
A feature that has set Firefox apart from other browsers is it’s ‘Add-ons’ functionality. More than 150 million people use Firefox Add-ons to customise their web browsing experience. Mainly created by third party developers, there are over 5,000 free Add-ons ranging from social networking toolbars, search bars and bookmarking tools.
The Mozilla brand have created a loyal community over the years, it commented on a recent blog, “The success of Firefox is due to the passionate and dedicated Mozilla community, comprised of tens of thousands of developers, localizers, testers, ambassadors and campus reps.”
The much anticipated Firefox 4, was originally scheduled to be launched at the end of 2010 but has recently been delayed til early 2011. Users of the Firefox 4 will see some notable improvements, including a sleek redesigned user interface, HTML5 support, multi-touch functionality, hardware-accelerated HD video and improved support for add-ons through Jetpack.
From a techy standpoint, “Firefox 4 is based on the Gecko 2.0 engine, which adds/improves support for HTML5, CSS3, WebM, and WebGL.Also, it includes a new JavaScript engine (JägerMonkey) and better XPCOM APIs.”
Congratulations to Firefox for six years of excellent user experience, we’re looking forward to seeing version 4 in action.
