IN DEPTH Firefox

Nick Peers takes a trip down memory lane to reveal the story behind the rise – and slight fall – of Mozilla’s popular web browser.

Credit: The Firefox logo is a trademark of the Mozilla Foundation in the U.S. and other countries.

T he last decade may not have been kind to Firefox and its parent Mozilla, but there’s no denying it’s still a vitally important cog in the web browser marketplace. Google doesn’t simply dominate the market with its Chrome browser, it’s also got fingers in virtually every other browser out there. Whether you’re using Opera, Vivaldi or even Microsoft’s Edge browser, you’re actually using the same underlying browser engine – Google’s Blink – as used by Chrome and its open-source brother, Chromium.

While Apple continues to plough its own furrow, powering Safari and all web browsers on the iPhone and iPad through its own WebKit engine, those of us who naturally detest large monopolies have just one holdout to turn to, and that’s Firefox. It continues to develop its own browser engine – Gecko – and for that reason alone you should consider giving it a spin if you’re not already using it. But there’s more to choosing Firefox than a simple desire to stand up to the big boys: Gecko and its own variant, Goanna, are favoured by a number of privacy-focussed browsers, including Tor and Pale Moon, for its strong security and privacy credentials.

So, while Firefox and Mozilla continue to overcome setbacks and dwindling popularity, we’re keen to celebrate its continuing mission, which has barely changed since the days it emerged to take on another behemoth. Discover where Firefox came from, how it’s developed over the years, what off-shoots (successful or otherwise) it’s inspired, and where Mozilla plans to take it next.

F irefox’s origins lie in the first browser war, which pitted Netscape Navigator against Microsoft’s Internet Explorer for control of the nascent browser market. Despite its early advantage, Netscape couldn’t compete against Microsoft’s tactics: offer the browser for free, then bundle it as the default browser in Windows 98 onwards. Unsurprisingly, the smaller company ultimately lost out.

By 2001, Internet Explorer had a whopping 96% of the browser market sewn up and left Microsoft feeling no pressure to innovate. Between 2001 and 2006, only one new version of Microsoft’s browser – IE 6.0 Service Pack 1 – was released. But despite losing the war, Netscape sowed the seeds for IE’s downfall.

In 1998, Netscape announced that development on the next version of its Communicator suite (which included Navigator) would be coordinated by the newly created Mozilla Organisation. Netscape Communicator 5.0 never saw the light of day; not only did AOL acquire Netscape for $4.2 billion later that year, but Mozilla’s developers found the ageing code unworkable.