Firefox Turns 15 (fastcompany.com) 50
harrymcc writes: On November 9 2004, a new version of Mozilla's browser called Firefox shipped. It was taking on one of the most daunting monopolies in tech: Microsoft's Internet Explorer, which had more than 90 percent market share. But Firefox was really good, and it became an instant hit, ending Microsoft's dominance of the web. Over at Fast Company, Sean Captain took a look at the browser's original rise, the challenges it faced after Google's Chrome arrived on the scene, and the moves it's currently making to put user privacy first.
Phoenix (Score:3)
I miss the Phoenix browser. It had the perfect feature set.
For those who don't get it (Score:5, Informative)
For those who don't get the joke, Mozilla Firefox was named Phoenix until version 0.6.
The name was chosen because it was rising from the ashes of Netscape. Except it wasn't - Phoenix was a project to remove features from SeaMonkey in order to make a lighter weight browser. Anyway, it was called Phoenix.
Phoenix Technologies, the BIOS people, had a browser that could run in BIOS called the Phoenix browser.
So Phoenix was renamed to Firebird, even though the Firebird open source database was reasonably popular at the time. Well that didn't work out and Firebird was renamed renamed Firefox.
Along the way, it got more and more features, so it wasn't the lightweight, trimmed down, fast browser it was originally designed to be.
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Re:For those who don't get it (Score:4, Insightful)
My post was 50% humor. I really did love the lightweight nature of Phoenix and its stripped down feature set. I still use Firefox as my daily driver - for most of the privacy related issues mentioned in the article. My only real gripe is that I wish firefox had stuck with the original simple core design and implemented all of its extended features as extensions that could be managed by the user. That and I have no use for Pocket.
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SeaMonkey is the true Phoenix. It is Netscape intact and unchanged, over what, a mere 25 years? Still the best browser ever, but the end is near
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SeaMonkey is the true Phoenix. It is Netscape intact and unchanged, over what, a mere 25 years? Still the best browser ever, but the end is near
No, Phoenix was more or less a fork of Seamonkey that stripped out everything except the browser. (From this was also born what became Thunderbird and Lightning.) Seamonkey has always existed in that form, originally intended to be the basis of Netscape 6 as the successor to Communicator, and still does. It's just a different project with, at least at the time, different goals.
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I was speaking a bit more figuratively.
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Umm, no. Pheonix had already been renamed twice to get to Firefox before the first SeaMonkey release. I used Phoenix, got annoyed when they changed the name apparently without even doing a rudimentary search to see if Firebird was something, and scratched my head when they settled on Firefox for no apparent reason. In a fun quirk, Firebird was a database, but the name they picked seemed to just be a glom of Firebird and FoxPro, another database.
Anyway, Phoenix/Firefox was the browser before Seamonkey repl
Navigator/Mozilla renamed to SeaMonkey (Score:2)
In 1998, from Netscape came the Mozilla Communicator suite, which included the Thunderbird mail client and the Navigator browser. Also known as the Mozilla browser, to distinguish it from Netscape Navigator.
Some wanted a lightweight stripped-down browser, not a heavy suite.
They launched the Phoenix project. Also, they bought advertising for Phoenix / Firefox. The success of the Firefox, with the advertising, meant that most of the foundation's attention went to Firefox. After the Phoenix / Firebird trad
Ps - split from the foundation (Score:2)
Btw the Mozilla Firefox branding was just one of two reasons we couldn't continue to use Mozilla browser as the name of the original project. The Mozilla Foundation leadership decided that the foundation would choose Mozilla Firefox as the official browser. Those of us who continued to develop the old codebase still used the same build servers, mailing lists, etc as we always had, but it was no longer an official Mozilla Foundation project. Therefore we needed a brand, a name, other than Mozilla. SeaMonk
Re:For those who don't get it (Score:5, Interesting)
Along the way, it got more and more features, so it wasn't the lightweight, trimmed down, fast browser it was originally designed to be
Well I'm glad you think that but everything was lightweight back then because we didn't have anything near what web pages do today. Netscape and the first few releases thereafter was anything but lightweight. The fact that it was so freaking fat was the reason Apple began work on KHTML to make WebKit. XPCOM was everywhere in the base. Everything, and I literally mean everything had a CORBA IDL interface using XPCOM. Things that needed to work together closely, didn't because they had to go through serialization because, because Netscape wanted to over engineer the damn thing. The serialization was simplified by Phoenix making it a strict XPCOM interface, so you couldn't use something like GNOME bonobo to wrap up a nsFrame anymore, but now the objects went through just a single object broker, that was a massive improvement since now I don't have to wrap an object in one format, then wrap it in another format, then wrap it in a network transparent format (because why wouldn't you want RPC for a desktop application?!), then send it off, then have it deserialized all the way back down.
I get people are nostalgic for the Web before 500 MB JS frameworks ate into everything, but gosh the first few years after Netscape the codebase was a complete nuclear disaster. I'm glad everyone remembers it fondly because it was a steaming pile really and the only reason it actually seemed snappy was because the semantics for HTML 3 and 4 were insanely simple to process and JS was like an after thought. There's no way with today's level of interactions that the browser would ever fly.
People jump on Lennart Poettering for over engineering shit, but gosh Netscape post 4.x series would put even that over engineering to shame.
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Phoenix was a project to remove features from SeaMonkey in order to make a lighter weight browser.
Before Phoenix, there were several lightweight browser projects such as Galeon that used the Mozilla engine underneath. The problem with these was that Mozilla was in constant development. When the "official" lightweight browser came out as Phoenix, it was somewhat heavier due to using things like XUL rather than native libraries (GTK), but on the other hand it was more stable as it matched the engine version every time.
Re:Phoenix (Score:4, Insightful)
Agreed. I came in at the end of the Phoenix line and that browser was great. It was the WordPerfect 5.1 for DOS of its day.
Having gone from Netscape to Phoenix was like the proverbial night and day.
And now, Firefox has become a petulant teenager (see my comment further down). I probably should have included a fat, petulant teenager. One which doesn't leave its parents basement.
15 isn't a high enough number (Score:3)
Going by the exponential version inflation Firefox is undergoing they should no longer measure its age in years. To whit, Firefox is now 473040000 seconds old.
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To whit,
Wat?
Mozilla has corporate interests too (Score:4, Interesting)
DoH IS about privacy - from the ISP. (Score:4, Insightful)
Not every decision made by Mozilla had been about user rights and privacy. ... they are now pushing DNS-over-HTTPS (and the browser having its own resolver making direct DNS queries to servers of its choice), where the standard-conforming (and UNIX-philosophy conforming) approach is DNS-over-TLS using the system resolver.
DoH IS about privacy - from the ISP.
The "UNIX-philosophy conforming" approach you advocate is fine against a wiretapper. But that's not the threat in question. When driven by DHCP it will go straight to the ISP's resolvers, and in most manual configurations it will do the same. That hands all your name-lookup history (browsing and other) to the ISP.
To "do it right" by your approach, you'd have to configure your system's resolver to go to a nameserver of your choice that is NOT one of those at your ISP. The browser can't do that for you, and you can't make it happen at all if you don't have administrative rights to the machine on which it's running.
But the browser CAN ignore the system resolver in favor of one of its own, do its own lookups on a server of ITs choice, and let you configure that choice if you chose.
- Encryption still blocks wiretappers.
- Using a not-your-ISP server blocks your ISP.
- Making it Further, making the default makes it happen as the norm, rather than only for a few who opt in.
- Letting you configure the selection similarly blocks the operator of the browser makers' selection.
You'd think that a still better approach would be for the BROWSER's resolver to use DNS-over-TLS and go straight to the root servers. But that fails as long as not all the domain servers are DoT capable.
Further, traffic analysis of the queries can leak info about what domains are being viewed. And going to the particular domain servers also gives "great firewalls" an opportunity to selectively block domains.
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DoH does not protect you from your ISP since the ISP will serve you the site. It does not hide the IP. If you know enough to setup your own network the solution is SDNS (or DNSoverTLS) with a forwarder that you trust and also supports SDNS or a VPN to a trusted ISP.
Browsers that ignore the systems reslovers are spyware. You do not secure a network by breaking it into many small pieces that complicate simple tasks. If every app does as it pleases then this all defeats the purpose of protecting the user since
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they agreed to support web DRM
After strictly protesting it and for the longest holding off implementation after it became standard. At some point, people were bitching that Firefox couldn't support streaming services that used DRM. So did you just want no one to Netflix? There's a time to take a moral high ground and then there's a time to know you've lost the fight.
And they are now pushing DNS-over-HTTPS
Which you can turn on or off. So you still have a choice and you can type in your own DoH service if you want.
DNS-over-TLS using the system resolver
That doesn't address the concerns of DoH. DoT has a dedica
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So did you just want no one to Netflix?
That is indeed what advocates for freedom-respecting software want. See "Cancel Netflix if you value your freedom" by Zak Rogoff [fsf.org].
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If you make it DNS-over-TLS, the ISPs might find ways to block that and then you'll be back to using insecure DNS calls that they just love ot track.
With DNS-o-Https, they can't distinguish it from internet usage, and they can't block that, so in a paranoid world of security, d-o-H is better.
As for the idea that its mozilla's severs, its not. Its coudflare's server and that's just there be default because there are no other mainstream D-o-H servers around that could handle the spike in traffic. You can type
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With DNS-o-Https, they can't distinguish it from internet usage
Of course they can, so long as the situation in which "there are no other mainstream D-o-H servers around that could handle the spike in traffic" remains in effect. ISPs would just block any IP address that belongs to Cloudflare's public recursive resolvers.
Now stop messing Firefox up. (Score:5, Interesting)
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firefox is getting bloated with extensions... and so you want a powerful API so users can extend it with extensions.... right.
The new API was made without some of the "power" because that was a security risk. Now, if tyou have an extension that needs some aspects that are not available, you can ask them to put it in.
The moz guys are doing a great job, ignore the idiots who will never be satisfied.
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Firefox is getting bloated with "recommended extensions" and "Firefox account/pocket".
One man's bloat is another's feature. Besides id they don't do things like bookmark porting which requires an account they will lose users to Chrome which does add those conveniences .
We need to make Firefox a fast browser once more and compete with the Chrome Monopoly that is forming.
OK, genius. Great idea. How much CPU are the firefox account and pocket eating up? I assume you've profiled and know for sure that they eat
Jetpack+Electrolysis had Keybinder (Score:2)
They have the most powerful extension API by a long way of any browser. That has to be tempered by a need to exist in a multicore world where security is important.
The Jetpack+Electrolysis extension platform, which was available from Firefox 52 to 56 before being replaced by WebExtensions, was compatible with multicore. It also had some features that WebExtensions never implemented, such as letting the user disable a keyboard shortcut that the user often accidentally presses. Accidentally pressing Ctrl+Q or Ctrl+Shift+Q when reaching for Ctrl+Tab or Ctrl+Shift+Tab causes data loss of all state not reflected in the page's URL, such as the contents of the text area into
Amazing browser (Score:3)
Tabbed browsing (Score:3)
What it had was tabs. While this seems like an obvious feature in retrospect, people had dozens of instances of IE clogging their taskbars.
NetCaptor and Maxthon (Score:2)
What it had was tabs.
If tabs were the key feature, what did Firefox for Windows have over NetCaptor and Maxthon? Those were tabbed browsers that wrapped an IE view.
#fatkids (Score:2)
I was fat by the time I turned 15, too. And I also had a massive footprint, just like Firefox does now... my feet hit size 16 when I was 15.
Remember when Firefox was supposed to be a platform, and only contain the necessary functionality? And everything else was in an add-on, like Web Developer? Those were the days.
And like a petulant teenager . . . (Score:3)
it doesn't listen to what you say but instead believes it knows better.
Thank theUS Justice Department (Score:3)
Mozilla Firefox was only possible because of the Monopoly ruling against Microsoft. If Microsoft won and was allowed to continue their anti-competitive practices as they were in the 1990's, all of the great Microsoft killers of the early 2000's (iTunes/iPod, Google Search, Gmail, Firefox, etc.) would have been blocked from Windows with only MS's proprietary options available for users.
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Though speed and memory efficiency were important, I don't think those were primary reasons why people started to ditch IE.
One of serious problem was security. IE used many Windows interfaces, which often were not designed to deal with untrusted data. As Microsoft tried to integrate IE with Windows as tightly as possible, there was no clear boundaries for security audit of the code. Moreover, having a majority of users meant that IE was a very attractive target for all malware.
Another problem is the lack of
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IE is still shipped with windows.
You don't understand how MS operated back then. If a software program got too powerful, MS would intentionally program windows to break it and make it run slower or with less quality. Literally. Like "if realplayer then break".
Microsoft was stalling, not competing (Score:2)
It was taking on one of the most daunting monopolies in tech: Microsoft's Internet Explorer, which had more than 90 percent market share. But Firefox was really good, and it became an instant hit, ending Microsoft's dominance of the web.
Microsoft wanted to delay the transition from fat desktop apps to web apps as long as possible. They didn't want to be faster, they didn't want to be more standards compliant they were only keeping up so their user base wouldn't bleed away too quickly. You can't lose when the other side doesn't want to win. They didn't seriously try to fight back until Google stepped in with Chrome, but then a decade of dragging their feet caught up with them and they continued to lose users even though IE9+ was kinda okay.
Remember When it Was a 4-Meg Download? (Score:2)
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it needs a downloaded
Not sure what that means, but are you referring to the extension called ScrapBook? There is a version called ScrapbookQ [mozilla.org] compatible with the new extension model.
Comment removed (Score:3, Insightful)
Its older than 15 (Score:2)
I am sure I can remember trying Firefox before I left the southern hemisphere in 2002.
Now it might have been a version prior to 1.0
version numbers in software didn't rise faster than a clock in those days.
Volunteer, Nonprofit Organization (Score:2)
The article talks about Mozilla being a volunteer, nonprofit organization.
And then it talks about $500,000,000/year in revenue from Google.
??
Firefox (Score:2)