On November 9, 2004, the Mozilla Foundation released version 1.0 of its Firefox browser. It should actually have been called Phoenix: Like a phoenix rising from the ashes of its ancestor Netscape Navigator, a new, leaner and faster browser was to emerge and resume the battle for browser supremacy – – .
Anzeige
Netscape Navigator was the most widely used browser in the mid-1990s. After Microsoft recognized the strategic importance of browsers, it launched the so-called browser war to push its Internet Explorer into the market. This period was characterized by proprietary browser extensions, such as ActiveX controls and Netscape plug-ins, which made websites work less well for one browser or another – a curse for developers and users alike. Microsoft ultimately won the competition, and Internet Explorer had a market share of more than 80 percent.
In 1998, Netscape disclosed the source code of its browser and the associated programs, the Netscape Communicator suite. Netscape had the development of a successor managed by the newly founded Mozilla Foundation. Mozilla 1.0 was released in June 2002, but this Mozilla Application Suite, as its full name was, was, like Netscape Communicator, a program package. In addition to the browser, it also contained a mail client, an HTML editor and other programs.
In the course of the new development, not every Mozilla developer agreed to maintain such a complex, sluggish and maintenance-intensive package. Some developers wanted to release individual, independent components that were more resource-efficient and faster.
Everything new in 2002
From 2002, an independent browser was created under the project name “Phoenix”. Phoenix 0.1 was released on September 23, 2002 and the nimble, slim browser quickly became popular among beta testers. However, it was not allowed to keep its name. The BIOS manufacturer Phoenix filed an objection on the basis of trademark law. The second name given to the baby – Firebird – was also dropped because a database project of the same name existed, whose members protested en masse.
So it became Firefox, the red panda. Mozilla discontinued development of the application suite from which Firefox emerged in 2006. It lives on in the Seamonkey project, which is still maintained by a community of developers today.
It is impossible to tell the story of Firefox without emphasizing the importance of Mozilla. In 2001, the foundation committed itself to the fight for an open Internet with the Mozilla 1.0 Manifesto: It states as an essential goal that the browser should adhere to standards better than any other competitor. In an update published in 2007, the foundation committed itself to maintaining the Internet as an open platform in general and making it an even better place.
Fire! The new browser was advertised with full-page ads in daily newspapers.
This attitude and the supremacy of the quasi-monopolist Microsoft with its proprietary Internet Explorer at the time explain why Mozilla staged the launch of its browser so lavishly: Donations were collected on several campaign websites. This was used to raise money for full-page advertisements in several daily newspapers, including the New York Times and the FAZ, in which even non-net-savvy people were informed about the new browser.
Firefox was a great success for many years, constantly nibbling away market share from Internet Explorer. On its tenth anniversary, Firefox was ahead of all other browsers in the usage statistics. Internet Explorer is still hidden in the depths of Windows as a kind of zombie for compatibility reasons. However, the browser has long been irrelevant. Microsoft has discontinued its support and is relying on its new Edge browser.
In the 2010s, the huge success of Firefox gave rise to the idea of creating a separate operating system based on the browser, Firefox OS. However, the system, which was presented with much fanfare in 2013, was never able to assert itself against iOS and Android, so Mozilla buried it again in 2017.
The browser as the basis for a mobile operating system: Firefox OS was ultimately only an episode, the system was unable to assert itself against iOS and Android.
By 2017, Firefox’s star was already declining, or as Andreas Gal, former head of technology at Mozilla, put it: “Chrome has won the browser war”. Google began developing its own browser in 2008. Over time, Chrome then replaced Firefox as the most widely used browser. The Chromium project technology on which Chrome is based is also used in many other browsers, such as Microsoft Edge, Vivaldi and Brave.
Only a supporting role
With its twentieth birthday, Firefox has surpassed the maximum life expectancy of its namesake. And it’s not as if the Mozilla browser has to be put on the endangered species list like the little flesh-and-blood panda. But the huge success of the past is long gone, and its market share is shrinking.
Internationally, the browser only has a market share of less than three percent, in Germany it still has a good ten percent. The only browser that can stand up to Chromium and its derivatives, with a market share of around 20 percent, is Apple’s Safari (all figures from Statcounter).
A healthy browser ecosystem needs diversity so that one day one company cannot dictate to everyone how they should use the internet. We’ve been through this before, and it didn’t go well. On that note: Happy birthday, Firefox, may you have many more birthdays!
(jo)