Just now it came to my attention that today marks the 10 year anniversary of what was effectively the dawn of The Mozilla Project, the non profit that brought us such gems as firefox, thunderbird, camino (mac only), and many more projects based off of any one of their apps (flock anyone?).
We sit on the eve of firefox 3, (I’m using the beta build right now to post this from) and looking back on the last ten years online for myself personally it’s incredible. I used netscape back then but soon moved on to IE not knowing how derided and detested it would end up being for various reasons by those the world over myself included.
Without firefox I would have viable alternatives in browsers like Konqueror for Linux, Opera and heck even Safari for Windows but I would not be as satisfied as I am now.
I felt I wanted to write something to mark this day, not as a way to say Happy Birthday to firefox or to congratulate them on the last ten years but rather to wish them success over the next ten.
Hopefully market share can be gained and Microsoft can finally be pushed to support web standards, who knows maybe in ten years Internet Explorer will have gone the way of Mosaic, at the least we will be done with IE6 (Thank god).
If you want to read more here’s the original Netscape press release regarding the GPL release of the source code, or you can read the post marking the anniversary over on mitchell’s blog @ mozilla.
Or if you would like click the button below to “rediscover the web”.
