Mozilla Firefox turns 5 as the Netscape legacy continues

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Five years ago today, I published a story on InternetNews.com about the release of Firefox 1.0. It really doesn’t seem that long ago to me…

The Firefox 1.0 release was the culmination of months of effort that ultimately spell the end of the Mozilla Suite (now SeaMonkey) as the main Mozilla browser. Firefox was supposed to be a revolution for the browser world, a browser that cut out the bloat and made things faster.

Five years later, it’s clear that Mozilla’s Firefox promise has come true.

Firefox introduced the concept of tabbed browsing to millions, easily developed add-ons and a host of other feature and performance improvements.

Beyond what Firefox has done on its own, with its users base of over 300 million, is its impact on the broader browser market and by extension every person on Earth that uses the Internet.

Five years ago Microsoft’s Internet Explorer development was stalled and there was little (if any) innovation from the browser market share leader. Since 2004, Microsoft has responded to Mozilla’s challenge with IE 7 and 8 and continues to ramp its own competitive efforts.

Google decided over a year ago that it wanted in on the action with its Chrome browser. Chrome is set in 2010 to be the cornerstone of an entire operating system for Google.

Would any of that have happened were it not for the success of Firefox?