Happy 5th Birthday, Mozilla Firefox!

Can you believe it? It’s been five years since this awesome Internet browser was first launched! I still remember using it for the first time – a couple of months after it was released – and vowing to myself that I would never use Internet Explorer again. Yes, that vow has been kept conscientiously; and I am willing to bet an arm and a leg that a lot of you have been thanking the powers that be for Firefox as well!

So anyway, it’s their fifth year, and the guys at Mozilla threw a birthday party at the beginning of this week. The birthday bash was held at the Terra Space in San Francisco. Naturally, Mozilla employees were there, together with their guests and some other people – probably present on an invitation only basis. (Obviously I wasn’t one of those.)

While Mozilla is celebrating five years of the existence of Firefox, the truth is that this web browser can trace its roots to a couple of years earlier than that, when Mozilla itself was founded. That was way back in 1998.

So what are people saying about Mozilla? Naturally, fanatics are singing praises. To balance it out though, let me quote David Coursey, who says:

On its fifth birthday, Firefox must be considered both an incredible success and somewhat of a failure. The open source Web browser is a great product and quite an achievement, but has not tremendously advanced the cause of “free” software. … You might think Firefox would have encouraged a wave of open source development, but from the perspective of a typical business or home user, it has not happened.

He does have a point, doesn’t he? Then again, for many satisfied users, I think that Mozilla Firefox is doing just great.

Photo courtesy of Business Insider