Firefox's birthday present to us: Teaching tech titans about DIY upstarts

It's hard to believe it now, but not too long ago the web was dangerously close to being owned by one vendor: Microsoft. As mainstream users came to equate Internet Explorer's logo with the Web, Microsoft worked to lock in its advantage with increasingly proprietary technology like ActiveX. It surely would have done so, too, …

[Zaphod.Beeblebrox]

I don't think that word means what you think it does...

"but for the seemingly futile Mozilla browser, née Firefox. Born in the ashes of Netscape's failed browser business 10 years ago this month as Phoenix,"

Surely then "the seemingly futile Mozilla browser, née Phoenix...", no?

[DJ Smiley]

Re: I don't think that word means what you think it does...

Mozilla browser (as it was formally know) became Firefox.

née means a change of name I believe? So.... its correct?

[Captain Hogwash]

Re: I don't think that word means what you think it does...

Née is the past participle of the French verb naître i.e.to be born. Usually in English this is used to indicate a woman's change of surname due to marriage. e.g. Mrs. Smith née Jones meaning that Miss Jones became Mrs Smith.

[Zaphod.Beeblebrox]

Re: I don't think that word means what you think it does...

Exactly - Mrs. Smith née Jones means Mrs. Smith was born Miss Jones.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: I don't think that word means what you think it does...

It was more like Mozilla browser was forked, optimised and called Phoenix, which later had to be renamed due to a name conflict.

[Greg J Preece]

Re: I don't think that word means what you think it does...

It was more like Mozilla browser was forked, optimised and called Phoenix, which later had to be renamed due to a name conflict.

...to Firebird (which is when I came in). Then they had to rename it again. Whoops.

[DrXym]

Re: I don't think that word means what you think it does...

"It was more like Mozilla browser was forked, optimised and called Phoenix, which later had to be renamed due to a name conflict."

It wasn't forked it was a branch and the idea of splitting out the apps in the communicator suite had been floating around for quite some time.

Netscape was already producing standalone prototypes way before Firefox. One of these was intended as a Thunderbird-esque email client for AOL but in the end AOL produced their own standalone Thunderbird-esque email client but they did so using wx windows, with Gecko used for rendering the email.

Then AOL took a moneyhat from Microsoft to settle a suit and everyone working on Mozilla was done away with. Fortunately AOL spun off Mozilla as a standalone company with some seed money and here we are.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: I don't think that word means what you think it does...

Phoenix wasn't the first name. It was originally called m/b when the project was started. m/b = mozilla/browser.

[DJ Smiley]

I maybe wrong....

"The message there is that human beings needn't simply wait for new gadgets to be bestowed upon them by the tech gods - they can go and make them themselves, and improve their world."

Hmmmm that'd mean you don't use Apples rendering for webpages on iOS devices. I believe you do even if its "firefox" your running the rendering system is still Apples? So much for throwing down those walls.

[Greg J Preece]

Re: I maybe wrong....

Hmmmm that'd mean you don't use Apples rendering for webpages on iOS devices. I believe you do even if its "firefox" your running the rendering system is still Apples? So much for throwing down those walls.

Have they actually done that yet? I know they refused for years to do that, then recently were um'ing and ah'ing about it.

[Ben Tasker]

When I bought RogueTouch through Apple's App Store I didn't buy it from ChronoSoft, the developer. I bought it from Apple, and were I to move to Android I'd have to buy it again... from Google.

I understand what you're trying to get at it here, but I can't quite agree. Even if you bought direct from ChronoSoft you would still only be getting the iOS version. Unless of course you want the purchase cost to contribute to the costs of developing for every supported platform. To some extent it may be that they already do, but that's very different to 'buy once, run on anything'.

It'd be different if you could write something for iOS and it'd run on Android, or at least be cheap to port, but that's not going to happen for some time. Even if it did, how many companies would use the true cost, rather than going "this would be £5 per platform, we support 6 platforms so we'll sell for £30"

Most companies I know (there are exceptions) won't let me have the OSX or Linux version just because I've already paid for the Windows version. Can't see it happening in the mobile world either (though again, there'll be exceptions).

It'd be nice, but I think we'd all end up paying a lot more for it.

[GrumpyJoe]

I think that's the point though...

Native apps are almost DESIGNED to be a tie-in. Companies have to gamble which one will bring in the most moolah, and mostly choose iPhone because of the purchasing power - hence Apple get the tie-in bonus!

If you could have something that ran WEB apps on it with native hooks and write-once-run anywhere then this advantage disappears - Boot to Gecko being one of the outcomes.

I DO begrudge paying for duplicate functionailty per platform really - I realise that it takes time to rewrite but that's not MY problem - that's a decision made by the platform incumbents to create an ecosystem that benefits them.

[Ben Tasker]

Re: I think that's the point though...

that's a decision made by the platform incumbents to create an ecosystem that benefits them.

The problem is the developers have to work with this system too, and they're the ones setting the prices.

I completely agree though, would be nice to have something like web apps that could use native hooks. Never likely to happen though, as it means there's no reason to pay Apple/Google any commission if you don't need to sell through their App Store. End result, the browsers not likely to support the hooks

[PerlyKing]

Re: I think that's the point though...

"Native apps are almost DESIGNED to be a tie-in"

Which makes it all the funnier that Steve Jobs originally insisted that all iPhone development would be in JavaScript, and only released a native SDK after intense lobbying!

[Greg J Preece]

Most companies I know (there are exceptions) won't let me have the OSX or Linux version just because I've already paid for the Windows version. Can't see it happening in the mobile world either (though again, there'll be exceptions).

Absolutely true, but there is an interesting exception: games. On Steam, if a game I own comes out for a new platform, I get it automatically. It's never been otherwise. It would be interesting if Valve eventually had that kind of influence on mobile apps. After all, there's a Steam mobile app. Not too much of a stretch to picture a Steam mobile games store that's cross platform.

[Dan 55]

This is how it should be done

Lonely Cat Games who do ProfIMail for Symbian phones allow you to change devices up to 20 times. Now that ProfiMail has come out for Android that includes Android devices so you can switch from Symbian to Android and bring your configuration and mail with you.

Then there's Steam where SteamPlay games work on both Windows and Mac as mentioned above.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: This is how it should be done

The ideal of having one app run across several platforms is only conceivable because smart phones have settled down to mostly being roughly between 3.5" and 4.5", with touch, gyros and GPS... If a device was significantly different to the current crop of phones, then an app would probably need re-designing anyway.

[Dan 55]

Re: This is how it should be done

Going back to ProfiMail, it works just as well for QWERTY keypad, T9 keypad, and touch phones.

[dssf]

wxWidgets... Julian and Harriet Smart

May the Lords of Kobol guard and guide them, for these two are among the enligtened few who DO let us have a choice of and one each of Linuc, Mac, and Windows versions of StoryLines/Writer's Café.

http://www.anthemion.co.uk/

I only stumbled upon them years ago not because i was looking for screenplay software or for a way to politically grind an axe, but because -- IIRC -- i was looking for ships related software, and wxWidgets was in tne search return, in, -- IIRC -- Opera or Firefox. Pursuing curiosity, i found Writer's Café. I have bought at least two versions, or one and updated at least or maybe twice.

Why the hell will not many other developers do it? I believe they are beholden to ms and apple marketing dollars and fiendish servile mentality, and chasing that Almighty Dollar. IIUC, in the case of Korea, two factors keep ms ahead, aside from ms dollars: it is easier for government and banks to herd and reinforce supporting ms first, mac grudgingly, and linux almost nil. And, developer or developers' bosses' arrogance and pride refuse to more openly cater to Linux. Just try using Naver or banking, or a slew of other apps online in Korea and feel fury engulf you because you must have ie and active x or other ms layers on a machine the server can graft onto... Ummm, work with.

There are some database and accounting packages, too, written by enlightened people.

[Anonymous Coward]

I remember it well.

I was using Opera 5.something. I downloaded Firefox and tried it at work for a week before switching back again. It's nice and all, but Firefox has always been a bit of a bloater. I think I mostly used Galleon at home at the time.

[asdf]

wow amazing

Wow what do you know a regular Opera user. I figured here in the states I would come across a Lumia owner first (still haven't). You sir much like the AmigaOS holdouts are a rare breed.

[Greg J Preece]

Well, I was waiting for that

Only a matter of time before the Opera lot showed up.

Firefox has always been a bit of a bloater? I used to run it from a floppy disk. No joke.

[Ian Johnston]

Re: Well, I was waiting for that

I still have a floppy disk with Netscape 0.9c for Windows on it. 900kB, as I recall, so you could get the Trumpet Winsock IP stack on there as well. Out of interest I've just tried "sudo apt-get install firefox" on the Lubuntu machine I'm writing this on. It's a 20MB download and needs 42MB of disk space.

And on my Xubuntu desktop, Firefox is still a bloated crawler, taking about four times as long to start as Chrome and using half a gigabyte of RAM just to show the google search page.

[Kiwi]

@ Ian Johnston Re: Well, I was waiting for that

"And on my Xubuntu desktop, Firefox is still a bloated crawler, taking about four times as long to start as Chrome and using half a gigabyte of RAM just to show the google search page."

Really? Something up there. 22 tabs open (half a dozen El Reg, couple of Google results pages, various tech sites and some with embedded video) and "only" using 200Mb. Running Zorin and not using "half a gig" for the whole system!

That said, once I'm done with the current lot I'll switch to Opera for a while and see how I feel about it.

(How does one get an advertising job with Google? For the right money I could switch to Chrome and even (for the right money) say that I like it! :) )

[Greg J Preece]

Re: Well, I was waiting for that

I still have a floppy disk with Netscape 0.9c for Windows on it. 900kB, as I recall, so you could get the Trumpet Winsock IP stack on there as well. Out of interest I've just tried "sudo apt-get install firefox" on the Lubuntu machine I'm writing this on. It's a 20MB download and needs 42MB of disk space.

Let's play a game called "spot the past tense". I don't run it from a floppy any more, partly because it no longer fits and partly because I don't use floppy disks any more, genius.

Firefox is still a bloated crawler, taking about four times as long to start as Chrome and using half a gigabyte of RAM just to show the google search page.

Aaaaand I call bullshit. Chrome and FF have similar loading times on my Kubuntu desktop, as well as my Win7 one. And the only way it's going to take 500MB for one page is if you had many other pages open very recently, in which case it still has them cached in case you bring them back, which is a (quite useful) feature of the browser. So sick of this stupid FUD argument, especially on modern machines where it makes no difference. Using RAM != slow and bloated. Get a clue.

[Fibbles]

Re: Well, I was waiting for that

"And on my Xubuntu desktop, Firefox is still a bloated crawler, taking about four times as long to start as Chrome and using half a gigabyte of RAM just to show the google search page."

I'm calling bullshit. I've got 5 pages running at the moment (all el reg) in firefox. It also has AdBlock Plus and the British English dictionary extensions running. It's currently taking up just under 200MB of RAM on my Xubuntu machine.

Anyone comparing the memory footprint of a modern browser and one from over 10 years ago, who then goes on to use it a proof of bloat, clearly does not understand how much web page complexity has increased in that time.

[John 110]

+1

"I was using Opera 5.something. I downloaded Firefox and tried it at work for a week before switching back again. It's nice and all, but Firefox has always been a bit of a bloater."

Firefox was slow as hell too, going back to Opera was a pleasure.

[kit]

Re: +1

Download the latest firefox 15 or 16 beta. It is faster than chrome by split of a second and very stable when surfing the web.

[Anonymous Coward]

You could argue, had Microsoft cleaned up and the Web had morphed into some monstrosity of x86 specific proprietary binaries then we would probably have something a lot better by now, instead of which we are still waiting for <video/>.

[ThomH]

You could argue that, but on the other hand we'd not yet have had the smartphone revolution or any particularly usable tablets because it's only ARM's virtual ownership of that market that's made Intel chips even slightly suitable for low-power use.

[Anonymous Coward]

You could argue that indeed...

...but you'd be wrong, and the rest of the internet would laugh in your face.

[FartingHippo]

"Firefox 1.0 is arguably the most important technology developed in the last 50 years"

You're joking, right?

[asdf]

Re: "Firefox 1.0 is arguably the most important technology developed in the last 50 years"

The key to that statement being arguably. I would nominate networking technology in general or the internet itself before Firefox but what do I know.

[The obvious]

Re: "Firefox 1.0 is arguably the most awful technology developed in the last 50 years"

You made a typo, but it's ok, I fixed it for you...

Ah yes, Firefox, the browser that took the dog's egg known as 'tabbed browsing' from netscape. From the standpoint of fitt's law it's quite possibly one of the least useful UI design ideas ever to become popular. That said, with Google rapidly turning Chrome into the next IE4 we may still need it yet...

[bigfoot780]

Msi ?

Still no official msi. Mozilla still missing out there .

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Msi ?

Don't cry over that! You have Portable Firefox which is even better than that, you need no installation at all.

[Gordan]

Regarding the point that we need Firefox OS to keep Google and Apple in line - I'm not sure that is the case at all. Android is already open with downloadable source available to everyone, and it is already, arguably illegally in breach of GPL forked by many a far-eastern manufacturer.

If we really needed a 3rd mobile OS, WinMo would be a bigger success than it's "rounding error" (to turn that term Ballmer so liked to use to describe competition) market penetration indicates.

There is even an argument that 2 mobile OS-es is too many and that iOS only got there purely on the strength of cult-following that Apple has as a brand - after all, you cannot buy a non-Apple device with iOS.

And let's not forget there is also Tizen (Maemo+Moblin->MeeGo->Tizen) - if we _really_ needed a 3rd mobile OS. While I wish Firefox OS the best of luck, something tells me that it's market penetration entirely depends on manufacturers getting behind it, but Android seems to have enough market momentum that the innertia of it is likely to prove impossible to overcome, or even dent. Ultimately - what is it that Firefox OS plans to bring to the table that Android doesn't already provide?

[Anonymous Coward]

One small mistake here

While Linux is GPL-licensed Android is not, so it can be forked at will. This is by design, Google did it like this so phone makers could add proprietary extensions in all impunity. No breach to see here unless you're talking about an illegal forking of the Linux kernel which we are not aware of.

[Gordan]

Re: One small mistake here

@AC:

Not quite. The hard part about porting Android and using it on different devices isn't the userspace, it's the kernel support for one of the bazillion SoCs and device implementations that are being used. Manufacturers write their own proprietary kernel patches and ship devices with them. They never make the source code for those kernel patches available. There is a truly mind-bogglying number of GPL violations relating to Android devices, including some major names. IIRC it took some major pressure and a long time before HTC released the kernel sources for their devices. StorageOptions have also never released the full sources to the kernel for their Telechips based Scroll tablets. There are many examples.

[Greg J Preece]

Re: What about starting off with some nice Principles, lad!

^^ What that man said. Mozilla have almost always acted in the best interests of their users, and the web in general. For example, with their sync, you get given the encryption key for your data. And with their software, they value the same things I do: expandable, highly customisable functionality, and an accurate rendering engine. Gecko still kicks the shit out of everything else when it comes to development, and the mobile browser has come leaps and bounds since it debuted.

Not the fastest group, and they have of late occasionally hinted at an inferiority complex, but their attitudes are far more in line with my own than many other similar organisations out there. That's why they're one of the projects I've donated to, and one of the stands I made a beeline for at the MWC in Barca this year.

It's also why I have the Boot2Gecko project checked out on my Linux partition. ;-) Tizen, too.

[Anonymous Coward]

So, where did it all go wrong?

This is opinion based on my own experience.

I started using the browser when it had some naming confusion - firebird.

At that time, ie4 dominated, microsoft got it right, Netscape had lost the plot with 'communicator', it became bug ridden bloatware.

I was dedicated to the cause, made a few donations, got the t-shirt and generally told everyone I could to give it a try.

It fitted perfectly with the birth of web standards, the rise of the 'ethical' web programmer - 'take back the web' was more than just a dig at microsoft for many, it was a dig at what commercial interests had wrought. A complete mess that led to the .com meltdown.

Somewhere between then and now, in my humble opinion, Firefox has come close to the fate of the ashes it sprang from. Certainly, it's a far cry from the mess that Netscape became. It's still a very capable browser, but compared to webkit based browsers, it's lagging behind.

The same people that lauded it, that promoted it, that lived and breathed the ethos behind what it stood for, are (mostly) now chrome users.

The reason is simple - it's a better browser. How arguable is that? Well, anything is arguable, but I think the numbers speak for themselves.

So, where does firefox go from here?

How does it take back the share from the young upstart?

Not easily. Google has become synonymous with web search, maps, mobile - heck, the internet itself.

The sheer clout it has in terms of revenue and marketing muscle is part of the reason Chrome has forged ahead of firefox.

The other reason?

It's a better browser.

I'll get my coat ...

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: So, where did it all go wrong?

As I can't edit this, I need to take back the bit I wrote about mozilla coming close to the fate of netscape.

I was more referring to bloat, but the comparison is a bad one - netscape went horribly commercial, so in that sense, there's no comparison at all.

*sniff* - I'm just trying to be loyal to the browser I stood by for six years - it was tough leaving it as my primary browser, but damn it all, bloat has set in...

[CSX321]

Re: So, where did it all go wrong?

Bloated? My Firefox directory is 39MB, and the Chrome application directory is 325MB! That's NOT including any cached data.

I just got done reworking my company site, and I discovered that Firefox is now doing a much better job than WebKit browsers at rendering some CSS3 features. Borders with border radius, in particular and in combination with box shadows, look a lot better with Firefox than with Chrome.

[asdf]

Re: So, where did it all go wrong?

Now that Firefox is largely cloning Chrome (can't beat em join em) the differences are much less pronounced than when Chrome first hit the scene and Firefox was a bloated overengineered (XPCOM wtf?) slow unstable POS. Since then Firefox has gotten its act together quite well due to the competition but too late for many who see little reason to switch back (I only do for banking with the NoScript protection and I like it on Android though I think its webkit now).

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: So, where did it all go wrong?

"though I think its webkit now"

Nope, it's still using Gecko. It just is using a Java-based interface instead of XUL.

[digdug2k]

Re: So, where did it all go wrong?

No webkit on Android. All Gecko (with a native Android UI on top). Despite a lot of PR to the contrary, Gecko's a pretty great rendering engine and getting much much better by the day right now.

I'm not sure what the "cloning Chrome" comment is about. Both browsers do have tabs and a back button. XPCOM is still around, and I don't think is going to leave anytime soon. Just get faster.

[Steve Knox]

Revisionism

This is Firefox's legacy, and it's too often obscured by the waxing and waning of market share numbers. So today when we use Chrome, Opera or even Safari, we should thank Mozilla and the community that enabled this choice.

So Mozilla enabled my choice of a browser that was developed 8 years before Mozilla existed? (see http://www.opera.com/company/) Since I was already using Opera when Firefox 1.0 came out, I never had a reason to switch.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Revisionism

And you think that if MS 'owned' the web today, Opera et.al. would even be an option any more?

[ScissorHands]

Re: Revisionism

Only because the "web cognoscenti" only care about software made in the USofA. Opera, like Nokia, have always been dissed by the ones that make the official histories.

[Greg J Preece]

Re: Revisionism

Only because the "web cognoscenti" only care about software made in the USofA. Opera, like Nokia, have always been dissed by the ones that make the official histories.

Fuck me, have the Opera fanboys gotten bad enough now that they're calling out racism as the reason no-one uses it?

You know FF is an international project, right?

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Revisionism

"racism"? Do me a favour.

If it's so "international" why, for example, has it just underlined favour as a misspelling? Oh yes, because this international project only uses English/United States [en-us] unless you manually install an alternative. As do all those other equally international products like Windows, Ubuntu etc, etc, etc.

A small point but it supports the point they made. The USofA bias is real and not just in Firefox.

[ThomH]

Re: Revisionism (@OsricTheGreat)

Your contention is that there's some ill-defined elite of Internet overlords that, behind closed doors, configure their machines to British English, download all the browsers, type 'color' into a text box and if no spelling correction hint occurs then allow the browser to succeed in the market?

[Greg J Preece]

Re: Revisionism

Oh yes, because this international project only uses English/United States [en-us] unless you manually install an alternative.

They default the language settings to their largest markets? THOSE DEVIOUS BASTARDS! Clearly this is all part of a plot to take down the valiant Opera!

[toadwarrior]

Re: Revisionism

Most people don't know where opera comes from. They don't use it because they do not like it.

[naive]

Firefox not only prevented that we would still be stuck with an internet based on IE6 flaws, but also provided Linux/X11 desktops with an excellent browser. Without this, the acceptance of Linux as a server alternative in the enterprise would have been lower because at the time MS was still fixing windows 2000, kde/firefox was a good platform to demonstrate the capabilities of Linux... look how beautiful and fast... and btw it can run Oracle and Sybase for months without bluescreens and memory leaks.

MS should however be credited for the fact that they were not a patent troll with patents like: "back button in a program to display information", "refresh button in...", "ability to store and display weblinks (aka bookmarks)"....

[Anonymous Coward]

Unfortunately the reason MS weren't patent trolls here...

...was simply that they didn't get the internet at all in any shape or form, so didn't realise how important a browser would be. That's down to short-sighted stupidity, not corporate ethics.

[cosmogoblin]

Vendor lockin

"We are in the middle of locking ourselves into our respective mobile platforms"

So many people already have.

I've replaced Windows with Linux to loads of people who don't know much about computers, giving them improved security and reliability, and every one of them has found it easier to use.

But I can't do this for anybody who owns an iPhone, because all of their music is on iTunes.

This of course won't change - Apple needed to release iTunes on Windows to suck people into their ecosystem, but releasing a Linux version would simply give them the option, when they decide to take the plunge, to go elsewhere than Apple. People aren't locking themselves into a mobile platform; they're locking themselves into a whole ecosystem.

[Sean Timarco Baggaley]

Re: Vendor lockin

Vendor Lock-in was the norm. Open platforms are, and always have been, an exception. The Atari ST didn't run Amiga software. The Commodore 64 didn't run software written for the Sinclair ZX Spectrum. And so on. The only "open" platform is the IBM PC Compatible, and even that was force open by Compaq's clean-room reverse-engineering project.

Nobody expects to be able to run an iOS app on an Android device, but then, you'd need to redesign the UIs for each version anyway, or you'd end up with a piss-poor lowest-common-denominator interface that nobody would want to touch with a 10-foot stylus, let alone their fingertips.

"But I can't do this for anybody who owns an iPhone, because all of their music is on iTunes."

You claim to have installed Linux on people's PCs and they find it "easier to use"—presumably these people never, ever, play any games— yet you can't copy some MP4 files out of a folder named "iTunes Media"?

You do know iTunes hasn't DRM on music for years now, right?

(It was Steve Jobs who convinced the music publishers to drop DRM, incidentally. Someday, the more rabid fanatics and extremists in this industry might at least have the decency to give him a little credit for that.)

[cosmogoblin]

Re: Vendor lockin

"You claim to have installed Linux on people's PCs and they find it "easier to use"—presumably these people never, ever, play any games"

That's right. I've helped gamers update their system, and I always recommend Windows 7, unless I think they can handle dual-boot.

"yet you can't copy some MP4 files out of a folder named "iTunes Media"?"

*I* can do that, yes. iTunes has a more insidious lock-in - every time I've tried to convince an iTunes user to move, they don't want to "lose iTunes". I explain that you can download music from other places, but they're not interested. This compounds the other problems.

"You do know iTunes hasn't DRM on music for years now, right?"

Nice in theory, but you still have to do a bit of work with old music downloaded before the DRM-free era. This is my fault - basically I undersold the alternatives. When I said "it's a bit of work but it can be done", they said "sounds too complicated, no thanks"; I should have said "give it to me for half a day and pay me £30 and I'll sort it for you". This was a marketing fail; apparently I don't have Apple's skill in this respect!

[Mark .]

Re: Vendor lockin

Open may be not the norm, but it's worth noting the advantages of such platforms when we have them.

Not sure what nonsense you're on about having to redesign UIs for every device - on Android, you write apps sensibly, so it scales to any resolution. It's on IOS that people seem to have locked themselves into a single resolution, which has now backfired as these days, IOS runs of loads of different resolutions (3 iphone resolutions, and god knows what for ipads).

The problem with itunes is not DRM (which the OP didn't mention - nice straw man), but when itunes scrambles the files. It doesn't have to do this when used on a sensible OS like Windows, but it does seem to be the default for managing software on ipods - so perhaps the OP is referring to a similar thing for iphones.

"Someday, the more rabid fanatics and extremists in this industry might at least have the decency to give him a little credit for that."

*Splutter* Jobs receives nothing but praise and credit, for all kinds of things he did or didn't do (and no, it wasn't Jobs who got rid of DRM). It's particularly funny that you say this, when you aren't even willing to give credit to open platforms.

Tell you what, I'll give thanks to Apple, the day I hear Apple fans give thanks to all the other companies that have helped or influenced Apple products. But you know what? I never ever do.

[mike acker]

understanding the "cloud"

=" Music and other content are easier to move, but still painful."

ah, --understanding!! the "cloud" wants to own your entertainment properties and just lease the use of them to you

cloud must be resisted at every juncture.

cloud ain't "whats happening" it is a method of control that the industry is attempting to foist upon consumers

[Anonymous Coward]

the web was dangerously close to being owned by one vendor: Microsoft.

That would be back in the day when it ran, almost exclusively, on Unix?

[SilverWave]

Firefox had the ad-block extension. FTW

Firefox was a great Proxomitron replacement.

Extensions were/are great.

Very secure compared to IE.

No active X.

User in control.

And this open source idea was odd but intriguing.

Firefox the gateway drug to Linux :-)

[mattymil]

I can dig it

Great article.

[mdc]

...

What the hell kinda drivel is this article? Since when has The Register been sponsored by Mozilla?

I should add, also, that alternative browsers started the HTML work-around NIGHTMARES that web developers had to go through for what... 6 years? Purely because they couldn't agree on how to implement the W3C standards. As someone who went through all that nonsense back then, 9 times out of 10, it was Firefox which had things wrong, not IE. I wrote perfectly compliant XHTML 1.0 Strict, and it rendered on IE perfectly. Firefox, on the other hand, would have a fit over even the most basic markup.

[Photoman-00010002]

Long Live Firefox

I use Firefox almost exclusively because it is the only browser I know off that provides full support for color profiling. It also runs the Ghostery privacy add-on better than IE9.

[TeeCee]

Learning from mistakes.

"[When] Mozilla released the Firefox browser[, r]eviewers lauded Firefox's speed, size..."

More importantly, they stuck to that and didn't let it become the bloated, sclerotic pile of shit that Netscape evolved into, which was what allowed MS to get their size twelves in the door in the first place.

I remember when we ditched Netscape Communicator and went Exchange / Outlook / IE, it was like getting double the memory and a liquid helium cooled overclocking job on the CPU.

[xj25vm]

Really?

Please - enough with the one-sided praises and glowing reports of Mozilla's role in the tech history. Can we know a bit more about Mozilla using virtually the same name for a not-for-profit organisation and a commercial entity? Is this sharing of brand awareness, good will and other resources between two entities with such different goals exactly healthy? Can we also talk a little bit about how, arguably one of the most important (and presumably impartial) players in the world of web technology receives the vast majority of its funding from Google - which has such vast interests in the area of web browsers, web advertising, mobile phones, mobile OS's, online office and collaboration suites, webmail and in general controlling and knowing every single bit of our lives? Is it all rosy and positive endevour we are talking about? A bit of critical thinking would be most welcome here.

[mhenriday]

Kudos to the Mozilla Foundation

and the Firefox developers - all of us, no matter which browser we use, are in their debt !...

Henri

[turnip]

Really ...?

So Mozilla paved the way for AJAX, the system that has its origins in XMLHttpRequest developed by Microsoft... (still used today) and CSS with Opera offering the first support of the standard which predates the Mozilla foundation. ActiveX allowed the development of rich content at a time when no other browser could have done so. HTML 5 apps and content would not have ran acceptably on the available hardware if it had been implemented back then. It barely runs acceptably now.

This is an appalling bit of revisionist history.