Firefox, Internet Explorer nemesis, turns five

Ever since the Firefox made its debut on the web, it has been downloaded over 1 billion times and today, it is being used by 330 million people who swear that it's faster and more secure than the IE.

Despite immense competition marked by the arrival of Google Chrome, Opera and Safari (by Apple), Firefox has held its ground. Not surprising, though, as Firefox was the first browser to introduce innovative features such as pop-up blocking, integrated search engines, add-ons and the most important feature - tabbed browsing, which allows many web pages to load within the same window, improving the speed and utility of web browsing.

Firefox has an interesting history. Before IE came into existence in 1995, Netscape Navigator, created by a company called Netscape (founded by Marc Andreessen, the leader of the NCSA Mosaic team which is credited for creating the world's first graphical web browser) held sway. However, ever since Microsoft began bundling IE with Windows, it quickly ate into Netscape Navigator's market share and initiated what is being billed as the industry's first browser war.

Netscape Navigator soon lost its dominant position but the company did not hang up its boots. Rather, in 1998, it launched what was to become the Mozilla Foundation in an attempt to produce a competitive browser using the open source software model. As a result, the Mozilla Firefox came into being and even in its beta stage, it received rave reviews and had a respectable fan following. In 2004, when the first official version of Firefox - Firefox 1.0 - was released, it became an instant hit and accounted for nearly 8 percent of browser use. And now, it controls nearly 25 percent of the browser market (IE, whose usage share peaked at over 95 percent by 2002, now controls 65 percent), ships in more than 70 languages and offers users more than 7000 add-ons to help customize their browsing experience and threatens to topple IE as the No.1 web browser - some poetic justice, I would say.

But it was not a smooth ride - Firefox had to contend with rivals such as Opera, Google Chrome and Safari and had to continuously introduce innovative features such as pop-up blocking, integrated search engines, add-ons, browser themes, central download manager, password management, recently visited URLs list and restore (in case of a browser crash) and the most important one - tabbed browsing (which allows many web pages to load within the same window, improving the speed and utility of web browsing) - to the web users to prevent them from deserting.

And today, Firefox remains a formidable platform with enough developer and end-user support to ensure it won't soon meet Netscape's fate.

Indeed, Firefox has come to symbolise technological freedom and has become the poster child of open source success. It can't be denied that Mozilla's efforts have helped to raise awareness about the importance of vendor-neutral web standards and the power of collaboration and community-driven development. Mozilla's philosophical values also became the cement with which the architects of the open web built our brave new internet.

However, Firefox isn't immune to the creeping ailments of age. It's gotten bigger and slower with each successive generation, and its prodigious use of memory and system resources remains a widespread source of irritation.

In fact, Firefox hasn't reached anything close to perfection after five years and still has a long way to go. Google's Chrome is faster and more stable; Microsoft's Internet Explorer 8 provides more useful tabbed-browsing options; Firefox's Mac version doesn't integrate with Mac OS X as well as Apple's Safari (though Safari's performance issues are sometimes taxing).

Not surprisingly, Firefox isn't willing to bask in its past glory and aims to make new breakthroughs that offer users more enjoyable web browsing experience.

"With additional entrants, most notably Google and Apple, joining the fray there's a massive amount of competition in the browser market that is fueling constant innovation and envelope pushing, from speed and features to the development of the mobile browser," Mozilla said in a statement.

"Five years ago today, Mozilla launched Firefox 1.0 with belief that, as the most significant social and technological development of our time, the Internet is a public resource that must remain open and accessible to all," said company spokesperson Sarah Doherty in an official blog post. "From your desktop to your mobile device, Mozilla is committed to building an open and participatory Internet. We've come so far in the past five years and we're incredibly excited about the next five."

According to Chris Blizzard of the Mozilla Foundation, a fourth major upgrade to Firefox will be released towards the end of this year or in early 2010 along with a mobile version of the browser called Fennec.

"Over the last five years we have been setting ourselves up for the next five. The web is moving faster, not slower, and modern browsers are set to handle it," Blizzard said.

"The modern browser is built for the future of web applications - super-fast JavaScript, modern CSS, HTML 5, support Relevant Products/Services for the various web-apps standards, downloadable font support, offline application support, raw graphics through canvas and WebGL, native video, advanced XHR capabilities mixed with new security Relevant Products/Services tools, and network capabilities," he said.

"Expect to see big changes in the video space. HTML5-based video and open video codecs are starting to appear on the web as web developers make individual choices to support a standards-based, royalty-free approach. Expect to see changes in the expectations around the licensing of codecs," he added.

Blizzard also took a jibe at Microsoft, saying, "We've managed to keep Microsoft honest and forced them to release newer versions of their browsers."