Project Mozilla Celebrates 20 Years of Firefox Browser
Project Mozilla celebrates twenty years since first release of the Firefox browser, which was a breakthrough for its time. Just 5 months after the first release, Firefox captured 6% of the browser market, reducing the share of MSIE to 89.04%. The key features of Firefox were the use of tabs to display sites and the involvement of the XUL language to create an interface and develop add-ons. Prior to Firefox, tab-based interfaces were only provided by the Opera Proprietary browser and the free project Galeon, which was abandoned shortly after Firefox’s appearance.
The idea of building a browser with an XUL interface arose in 2002, taking about two years to prepare the first stable release. Initially named Phoenix, the browser was later renamed Firebird due to trademark conflicts. Dissatisfaction from developers of a free DBMS with the same name led to another rename, now to Firefox.
At its peak popularity in 2010, Firefox held a 32% share of the Web-Browser market. Currently, data from Cloudflare Radar shows Firefox’s proportion at 3.8%. In comparison, Chrome holds a share of 27.4%, Chrome Mobile – 30%, Mobile Safari – 13.5%, Chrome Mobile WebView – 8.3%, Edge – 5.5%, Safari – 3.3%, and Samsung Internet – 2.1%. According to Statcounter, Firefox’s share is 2.65%, and Wikipedia statistics show it at 4.7%.
Laura Chambers, who assumed the position of CEO of Mozilla Corporation this year, discussed in an interview with Techcrunch, the efforts to