
Eight Years of Firefox - pragmatictester
https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2012/11/09/eight-years-of-firefox/
======
mjb
I think Firefox has to take a lot of credit for the state of the web today. In
the early 2000s, it was usual for sites to be IE-only, or to be horribly
broken in any alternative browser. It seems to me that the rise of popularity
of Firefox correlated strongly with a drop in these IE-only sites, and I don't
think that its unfair to label it as a dominant cause of this drop. Even if
Firefox dies completely and leaves behind only Chrome, Safari, Opera and IE in
its wake, I think it's still fair to call it a great victory for open
standards and open source.

~~~
wyuenho
Not to discredit Firefox for spearheading our revolt against the IE monopoly,
but I think Firefox has sometimes been given too much credit for everything
from standard compliance to innovation, and not enough credit to other
browsers on the market.

First of all, standard compliance. I don't think Firefox 1.0 or its ancestors
and subsequent version are all that standard compliant. Yes, for about 1 year
in 2004-2005 it was the most standard compliant browser on the planet and
could display most sites not written specifically for IE the way they were
meant to be. But that drive to remain standard compliant quickly evaporated.
When Safari 2.0 came out in 2005, it passed Acid2 and continued to be the most
standard compliant, fastest browser on the planet with the cleanest code base
for the next couple of years. And yes, it could render sites just as well as
Firefox. Firefox OTOH, didn't pass it until 3.0 came out in 2008, and the
second to last to pass Acid3.

Secondly, usability. I don't think Firefox from the day it came out to the
present day is all that great in terms of UX. People seem to have forgotten
that most of the browser UI features we take for granted came from Opera and
later Chrome. Tabbed browsing? Opera first. Tab preview? Opera first. Most
visited sites? Opera first. Tab groups? Opera first. Download Manager that
speaks BT? Opera first. Mouse gestures? Opera first. The driver to innovative
browser UI had always been Opera ever since IE dominated the market until
Chrome came along in 2008 with its tab in title bar and omnibox. The only
thing Firefox pioneered is the 3D view in the newer Firefox's inspect bar,
which they somehow prioritized over consolidating all those overlapping and
confusing developer tools, and making live editing in the markup panel
possible, as in Firebug had been doing since 2007ish.

Third, under the hood innovation. Since the Netscape era to the present day I
think the one most prevalent problem is misplaced focus. Mozilla simply has
way too many sub-projects going on, not all of them important, and all of them
compete for resources. Just look at how many man-hours Mozilla devs have
wasted on technology that no one likes to use / can use but nevertheless bloat
up Gecko. XPCOM, XUL, all those W3C alphabet soup X* standards in the early
days, and then later on putting more and more JS features like let and
generators into the JS engine. The APIs used to write extensions were a
TERRIBLE mess before FUEL came out.

Lastly, speed, memory usage, and stability. Not until last year Firefox'
launch speed was the slowest of all. It was unbearable and had not been
addressed until very recently. Same for memory usages. In terms of JS exec
speed and rendering speed, it was also among the slowest, only slightly faster
than IE, though there has been significant improvement in this area as well
this year. In terms of stability, it was not until recently that it got a
boost using the same technique Chrome pioneered.

I can keep going on and on but the one thing that I cannot stress more is
Mozilla's inability to focus on what's important. There was a time when
Netscape had 80% of the market and Firefox a trend to break through 40% usage,
but innovation stagnated while Safari, Chrome and Opera have continued to
improve by leaps and bounds. There seems to have been many significant
improvements to these problems recently and I certainly hope to see more
aggressive innovation and focus from the open source community around Mozilla.

~~~
pinaceae
practically nobody used Opera, Safari only was relevant on OSX (when was it
released for Win? I do not remember).

Opera was innovating, but did not break any stranglehold. Remember you had to
pay for it? Remember it had ads embedded?

My number 1 reason for using Firefox against IE was AdBlock. Killing those
damn intrusive ads, banners, popups, the whole infestation was a godsend. IE
didn't do it. Opera _refused_ such plugins, because they were ad-supported
themselves - I know cause I tried arguing with them at the time.

I don't think it is a coincidence that Chrome took off once AdBlock plugins
became possible and available.

I now I am not alone in not being able to browse the web without blocked ads
anymore - just like I am not able to watch regular TV with ads anymore as
well.

~~~
wyuenho
Haha I knew that post was going to be unpopular.

FYI, Opera had been free as in beer since 2006, Safari on Windows since 2007.
Irrelevant to the browser market of course because either had the number of
extensions FF had available. Opera also had (and still have) a lot of trouble
rendering sites that work with FF and IE, and Safari Win was so much unlike
everything else on Windows, nobody uses it just because it's weird.

This post is about placing credits where they are due. Copying functionality
from one browser to another one isn't innovation, but I have to admit that one
major reason Firefox got popular was the extensions that copied all those
functionality from Opera over before Firefox had them. For some reason Firefox
never really got to reach 40% usage, and now it's too late. I'm just a little
disappointed.

------
robinwauters
I really hope this doesn't get down-voted because it's a little promotional,
but I posted a video interview with Mozilla's chairwomen Mitchell Baker today,
she said some interesting things I think.

[http://thenextweb.com/video/2012/11/09/happy-eight-
birthday-...](http://thenextweb.com/video/2012/11/09/happy-eight-birthday-
firefox-a-qa-with-mozilla-chairwoman-mitchell-baker-video/)

Direct YouTube link: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bCWtvtwhFCk>

~~~
riobard
s/chairwomen/chairwoman/

~~~
cpeterso
or simply "chair".

~~~
pbhjpbhj
Or just "chairman" because it's the name of a position within a board or
meeting and is gender neutral.

~~~
debacle
I find the term discriminatory against stools and benches.

------
kibwen
Eight years and 800,000 bugs:

<https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=800000>

Given its age and heritage and historical influence (and given that it's used
by hundreds of millions of people), Mozilla's codebase is right up there with
Linux and GNU as one of the most impressive examples of open-source software.

~~~
olliesaunders
I can't tell if this is sarcastic. But before I read this post I was going to
say how much I love Firefox but regret how they fail to address bugs before
implementing new features. 800,000 bugs is nothing to be proud of.

~~~
mmcnickle
Mozilla bugzilla has reached bug id 800000. Mozilla typically file a bug for
every actionable item, not just defects; the number of non-bogus, non-
duplicate, non-feature-request, non-tracking-bug, and non-firefox-bugs
(website, thunderbird, all other products since inception) will be much, much
fewer.

~~~
dailycavalier
Yes, this. There have been 800,000 bugs filed for all groups within Mozilla.
We use bugzilla for managing projects and tasks (ex: a request for the Firefox
8th birthday cake graphic in the blog post). It's not just for tracking
Firefox bugs. We use it for just about everything.

------
RyanMcGreal
I remember making the jump from Netscape 4.72 to Mozilla 1.2, modulo a little
dalliance with IE when it was still ahead of the curve. I've been on
Mozilla/Firefox ever since, and never made the jump to Chrome as my main
browser (though I have it installed). Firefox just keeps getting better and
better, and I'm delighted at how the friendly competition between Firefox and
Chrome is driving faster improvement to both, rather than the divisive
extend/embrace/extinguish competition between Netscape and IE.

~~~
kibwen
Ah, Netscape! I still have its throbber animation[1] indelibly burnt into my
memory.

I also still remember being a bit baffled as to all the excitement people were
expressing over something as mundane as a _web browser_. Remember the full-
spread two-page launch ad in the New York Times?[2] Firefox was probably the
first time I'd ever heard of something "open source" in my entire life. And of
course, tabbed browsing was love at first sight.

[1] <http://www.jwz.org/doc/about-nscp-anim.gif>

[2] <http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/press/mozilla-2004-12-15.html>

~~~
T-hawk
Opera had tabbed browsing way before anyone else, in 2000. And actually even
before that by handling pages as MDI document windows in its early versions.

I used Opera all through the long night of IE6 hegemony, although always ready
to switch back to IE whenever a site didn't work in Opera. There was a good,
actively developed, standards-compliant browser available that whole time. It
just never caught on in terms of popularity and mindshare. I hardly even
noticed Firefox until around version 3.

~~~
kibwen
I didn't intend to downplay the importance of Opera, I just hadn't heard of it
until I was well into college (during which I used it as my primary browser
for about half a year; to this day I still have Opera's back/forward mouse-
button rocker gestures mapped in Firefox). There's no question (afaik) that
Opera was the first to get on the tab train.

~~~
brokenparser
They weren't even tabs when Opera invented them. It just had a toolbar at the
bottom, see here:

<http://i.imgur.com/bURNJ.gif>

This is the ad-supported version 5, you had to enter a key to remove them.
Prior versions were shareware.

StarOffice had a similar idea but they made an effort to show where they were
drawing inspiration from: <http://i.imgur.com/fiQ5c.jpg>

(For those who are wondering, yes LibreOffice is its legacy.)

------
mmahemoff
Eight years since 1.0, though its history dates back a lot further.
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Firefox>

~~~
fafner
It's actually more than 10 years now. The first binaries of Phoenix were
available in September 2002.

I don't remember when I exactly switched. But I remember that Mozilla was a
huge pile of bloat, Galeon had some internal trouble, and Konqueror/KHTML had
problems with several websites (mostly JS stuff IIRC).

Firefox is still my favorite browser!

~~~
jdechko
I don't remember which version I started on, but remember a friend showed me
one of the Phoenix betas. I had been using Netscape, and then the Mozilla
suite, but I was blown away by what I saw. Ever since then, in some form or
another I've used firefox.

------
barking
I like firefox a lot, it's the browser I use almost all of the time.

I really like the way firefox allows me to sync bookmarks across devices.

I really like the fireftp add on.

I don't like the way firefox makes me wait sometimes while it updates.

It's really hard to figure out some things.

One time I accidentally forgot to press the tab key after entering my username
on log-in and entered my password in the username box (in plaintext). It took
ages (even after googling) to figure out how to stop firefox offering my
username+password as a log-in suggestion

~~~
caipre
For those who don't know, it's possible to remove an autocomplete suggestion
by highlighting it and pressing the delete key. This works for HTML form
fields and address/search bar suggestions.

~~~
barking
I didn't know about that, thanks

------
ed_blackburn
I remember being at uni (UWE Bristol), downloading the zip and exporting to
program files. My mates thought I was crazy until they saw tabbed
browsing...wow!

~~~
jonnymkramer
hah weird seeing another UWE person on here. What are you doing now?

~~~
ed_blackburn
I couldn't find a decent grad role in Bristol so I ended up in London, where
I've since settled. I'm a dev after graduating in 2004 with a Computing and
Information Systems degree. Since I graduated I realise that a few my UWE
lecturers were really good. I didn't see the point in being asked to read Kent
Beck and Martin Fowler or what I'd learn from substituting Slackware Linux's
ls for my own shoddy implementation, but now I see that those visiting
lecturers from Rolls Royce and Airbus knew what I'd need to know in the real
world. Doing a Sandwich course and spending a year writing production code for
Pfizer was beneficial too. You?

<http://ejb.name>

------
leeoniya
favorite quote from Mike Shaver (in context) from
<http://john.jubjubs.net/2011/09/15/mike-shaver-thanks/>

"And [Shaver] affected my framing of the problem deeply – I remember one day a
couple of years back when we were talking about some market share point,
thinking about how incredibly, insanely competitive the browser technology
landscape was – and he said to me: 'Look, this is the world we wanted. And
this is the world we made.' Wow. Exactly right. He taught me so much about how
enormous an impact a group of dedicated people can make."

------
navid_dichols
Firebox's firebug addon makes it worth the price of admission. Thanks for a
great 8 years FF!

Side note: if you could add support for base64 pngs embedded with the data uri
you could really help me out of a jam...

~~~
dailycavalier
File a bug to request that :) <https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/>

------
cheeaun
I'll never forget the first time I try Phoenix 0.1, all the way to Firefox
1.0, and still continue using it now with version 18 (Aurora).

~~~
jjkmk
You're such a browser hipster ;)

------
jnazario
while i applaud firefox for pushing IE off the stranglehold it had on sites
(see mjb's comment), i cannot forget the stagnation it endured for a while
with its crummy memory performance for long running users. it took a couple of
years for someone to acknowledge that yeah, that's a real issue and worth
fixing (IIRC it was heap fragmentation, beautifully visualized in a blog post
where the author basically said "holy smokes! people were right!"). i turned
to safari briefly and now to chrome and haven't looked back.

firefox's position allowed it to get sluggish in features and performance. a
lack of true competition in alternative browsers for that brief period of time
(you either used IE and were afraid to move, were prevented from it in a
corporate setting, or you used firefox and wouldn't go back) showed that such
stagnation can happen to anyone. bloat, performance drops, etc ...

thanks for opening up the web, but that stretch of time has forever burned me
on mozilla products.

~~~
TwoBit
I think that during that time period they were so focused on other things that
the memory problems crept in and didn't get addressed. On the plus side, they
now have both the best features and some of the best memory management of
browsers.

------
dageshi
I remember using netscape (maybe 4...?) I'd just upgraded and remember for
whatever reason double clicking on a html doc on my desktop and watching it
sit there load up an entire suite of apps I wasn't going to use.

That was it, immediately switched to IE. I preferred Netscape but the load
time was too frustrating.

And then when firefox came out (or at least one of the later version) I
remember repeating that exact same thing. I needed to open a html file on the
desktop and IE was sloooow. So I tried firefox, much much faster. And then
there was firebug.. no contest, game set and match.

I switched to chrome for about a year because it seemed to render pages faster
but about 3 months ago I ran into some weird problem where chrome stopped
playing youtube videos properly. Tried everything, no luck, switched back to
firefox and actually... I think I'll stick with it, it's a great browser.

------
AndresOspina
In my humble opinion I think that while Firefox has asked some ground in
market share, does a great job with the web and compete against the negligent
microsoft products had 8 years to give us a better browsing experience we know
today has much to do calving with Firefox.

------
limpangel
Can't believe it's been this long since I ditched Opera and started using
Firefox as my main browser.

~~~
barking
I can't believe that it's only 8 years since firefox started

------
sabret00the
Today is the anniversary of the settled identity crisis that once was. Firefox
has served me great for years though and now I can't imagine calling it
anything else.

------
nkuttler
I rememer Firefox primarily for being a snappy browser, they got rid of the
kitchen sink Netscape/Mozilla suite bloat. Sadly Firefox is now far behind in
regard to performance compared to webkit-based browsers, for which the
XUL/Toolkit, the feature creep and the legacy support are probably
responsable.

Using Firefox nowadays just feels too slow, even though it's addon ecosystem
is unrivaled.

------
webwanderings
Thanks for informing it has been 8 years I used this product, I think the
longest of any other leaving aside my OS. It was hard parting ways few weeks
ago but it was done and now I don't regret.

Good luck for your future.

