With about 20% of the global browser market, a strong brand and a huge developer ecosystem, it’s easy to forget that Firefox is only five years ago.

Firefox 1.0 was in November 2004 by the Mozilla Foundation, and it’s grown from the little browser that could to a worldwide phenomena with more than 330 million users.

As important, Firefox has arguably kept the browser market alive, well, vital and innovative. After Microsoft’s Internet Explorer vanquished the Netscape Navigator, the browser market was, well, pretty boring. Then, Firefox emerged onto the scene and popularized the use of browser tabs and add-ons to personalize the browser.

Microsoft had no choice but to respond if it wanted to maintain its dominance of the browser market. And while IE still has about 70% market share, the browser market is a pretty exciting place with players such as Google’s Chrome, Flock, Opera and Apple’s Safari battling for attention.

So, happy 5th birthday, Firefox!

Tags: browser, chrome, firefox, IE, mozilla

This entry was posted on Monday, November 9th, 2009 at 5:05 am and is filed under Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.