Firefox at Five
November 11th, 2009 | by rey |
Everyone’s favorite open-source browser, Firefox, turned five years old on November 9. When version 1.0 was launched, a good number of netizens migrated to it as the best alternative to Microsoft’s problematic Internet Explorer 6.
Probably one of the reasons for the rapid rise in Firefox’s popularity was the lack of innovation in IE 6. MS had been sitting on their laurels since IE 6 came out in 2001. Firefox was a highly customizable browser allowing users to add functionality through the use of extensions/add-ons. It also supported tabbed browsing. Firefox was also perceived as being more secure than IE as Microsoft’s browser was prone to exploits mainly due to it’s large market share which made it a primary target for malware.
Firefox currently has around 330 million users holding the second spot with over 24 percent of the browser market share. Internet Explorer currently holds over 64%, with Safari, Chrome and Opera bringing up the rear with 4.42, 3.58, and 2.17 percent, respectively.
3 Responses to “Firefox at Five”
By ramaraobobby on Nov 13, 2009 | Reply
Firefox is my favorite browser too and kudos to Firefox for their 5 years of successful journey. They have almost outdated the use of IE for most users. But the only problem with Firefox is the
it gets slowed down with the passage of time mainly effecting startup time, browsing Histories load time. Anyways we can easily overcome this problem by using speedyfox.
By rey on Nov 15, 2009 | Reply
ramaraobobby, thanks for the info on speedyfox. What I do to keep firefox fast is keep my addons to a bare minimum. Firefox’s extensibility can also be its downfall if you go wild in adding extensions to it.