Mozilla Firefox 1.0 turns four

From the "time flies" files:

Firefox 1.0 was officially released on November 9th, 2004 - and it's been (mostly) uphill for Firefox ever since.

Do you remember the pre-Firefox 1.0 era?

Firefox was an early adopter's choice and far from the mainstream. Tabbed browsing was a novelty that few had ever experienced and the idea of add-ons/extensions was also relatively new.

Can you imagine using a non-tabbed browser today?

Firefox 1.0 was the first big release for Firefox, its first major milestone. Since then we've had many releases - more security updates than I can count and major versions in Firefox 2.0 and Firefox 3.0. It's been a steadily forward development path that continues even now. This week we'll see both a point update with the 3.0.4 release and a development release with Firefox 3.1 Beta 2.

Perhaps more importantly is the fact that the Firefox 1.0 release re-ignited a new age of web browser innovation (some call it a second browser war) where we've seen Microsoft ramp ups its efforts with Internet Explorer version 7 and the currently under development version 8. Apple Safari, Opera and now Google Chrome all have skin in the game too.

Hard to believe it has been four year already, isn't it?