Firefox is 10 years old

Apparently, even the employees of the Mozilla Foundation themselves did not want to remember what the journalists of some online publications noticed - on September 23, 2002, the nonprofit fund Mozilla Foundation, with the help of former members of Netscape Communications, released the first beta version of the Phoenix 0.1 browser, which historically can be considered the first version of the current Firefox browser.

Phoenix lasted under this name until April 2003, when, due to a name conflict with Phoenix Technologies (a manufacturer of BIOS firmware), it was renamed Firebird. As it soon became clear, and this name was already taken by the well-known open DBMS Firebird, and in 2004, finally, the first full-fledged version of the browser appeared under the now-known name Firefox 1.0.




Compared to Internet Explorer 6.0, Firefox offered such nice improvements as tabs, RSS, a change of themes, a bookmark bar and other other tools that Micrsoft simply did not have. The popularity of the new browser increased in geometric progression, and in 2008 it overcame the mark of 500 million downloads, thus becoming the second most popular browser in the world.

After Google launched its browser in 2008, Chrome, the position of Firefox can no longer be described as dominant among alternative IE browsers. According to StatCounter, at present, 23% of Web users use Firefox, while another participant is already fighting for leadership with Internet Explorer - Google Chrome itself.

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