On November 9, but 15 years ago, version 1.0 of the Mozilla “Firefox” web browser was released which would become one of the most popular web browsers and that would give an arduous battle to the monopoly of "Internet Explorer" in those years. As back then Internet Explorer, dominated about 90% of the market and its other hard-hitting competitors were barely reaching a few percentage points. Firefox as such was not born that day, but has its history.
As Mozilla was originally the code name for Netscape Navigator. DFor several years, Netscape tried to wage war on Microsoft with your web browser, but it was of little use. So Netscape Communications had the idea to release the source code of his Netscape 4.7 browser and thus make it a free software project.
Here was the start for FirefoxA community of developers was created to design a new, improved browser focused on following the W3C web standards. Thus the Mozilla project was born, taking up the code name of Navigator.
Mozilla was rewritten almost from scratch after it was decided that a new set of widgets would be developed and based on. XML-based multiplatform called XUL, which made it take much longer to appear than initially expected, releasing a high-quality version 1.0, translated into a large number of languages and multiplatform, on June 5, 2002.
Mozilla was subsequently dropped from Netscape Communications and with it the Mozilla Foundation was born.
Meanwhile the browser suffered with setting a name to this, because as such the name of Firefox was not the original name, since it took some attempts to establish the name of the browser that is known today.
Firefox, originally opened had the name "Phoenix" but because it had problems with legal reasons, it had to be changed as the name was already registered by the BIOS developer Phoenix Technologies.
Then, Another decision was made and the second name chosen was "Firebird", This caused a controversy on the part of the Firebird database and that in addition there was a constant pressure on the part of the community that forced to consider other names such as "Firebird Browser" and "Mozilla Firebird".
It was then that on February 9, 2004 it was finally renamed Mozilla Firefox (It seems that Mozilla had or has a mania with animals with fire).
And a few months later version 1.0 of Firefox would be released "on November 9, 2004".
In that same year and a few weeks before, the first version of Ubuntu was released to the world, which we already talked about in a previous article (you can check it in the following link). That version of Ubuntu had version 0.9 of Firefox.
And good, since then the browser has undergone various changes of which during the first years many of them were the main attractions of the browser to gain a large number of followers.
One of the most emblematic was the ability to improve the experience of using the browser with the help of the cplugins, as well as tabbed browsing, a download manager. Hence, among others that were appearing and also eliminated over the years.
Regarding the development of the browser, during the first years it was quite slow, since there was no established calendar as such, since by 2011 we barely found Firefox 4 and three months later Firefox 5 would be released.
In that same year with Firefox 4 and from the launch of Firefox 5 the development process was established that was divided into several "channels", each working on a build at a different stage of development, from which the Nightly versions would be born, "Aurora" is up to six weeks behind "Nightly" which would later be renamed "Developer Edition".
On the other hand, the development cycle would be set to the release of a new version every 6 weeks.