The internet’s favourite underdog-turned-giant, Mozilla Firefox, celebrates its fifth birthday today and moves closer to its goal of breaking Internet Explorer’s monopoly of the web browser market.
With Firefox, Mozilla brought us the wonders of tabbed browsing, integrated search engines and browser add-ons, all of which we couldn't manage without today.In 2004, the not-for-profit company started out with 12 employees and a handful of volunteers with the sole aim of overtaking Microsoft in the browser market. Today, Mozilla enjoys a 23 per cent worldwide market share and has even overtaken IE usage in more than a dozen countries.
Speaking to Sky News, Tristan Nitot, president of Mozilla Europe, said that the company’s initial mission to ensure browser “freedom” remained the same. He added: “applications like a browser are a set of instructions put together by a developer. It does a lot on your behalf and you lose a lot by delegating this. It’s extremely important to remain in control.”
Firefox’s success shows no signs of slowing either. Recent figures show they have added another 30 million users in the last eight weeks. Mozilla is also looking towards mobile phones now, with its new mobile browser, Fennec, currently at the beta stage and due for release in 2010.
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