History of Mozilla Firefox

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Mozilla Firefox project was created by Dave Hyatt and Blake Ross as an experimental branch of the Mozilla project. Firefox 1.0 was released on November 9, 2004.

1 Early beginnings: a pared-down browser
2 Naming
3 Branding and visual identity
4 Delicious delicacies
5 The road to 1.5
6 Release history
7 Future development
8 References
9 See also
10 External links

[edit] Early beginnings: a pared-down browser

Hyatt and Ross' mozilla/browser (later Phoenix, Firebird and finally Firefox) browser was created to combat the perceived software bloat of the Mozilla Suite (codenamed, internally referred to, and continued by the community as SeaMonkey), which integrated features such as IRC, mail and news, and WYSIWYG HTML editing into one software suite.

Firefox retains the cross-platform nature of the original Mozilla browser, using the XUL user interface markup language. The use of XUL makes it possible to extend the browser's capabilities through the use of extensions and themes. The development and installation processes of these add-ons raised security concerns, and with the release of Firefox 0.9, the Mozilla Foundation opened a Mozilla Update website containing "approved" themes and extensions. The use of XUL sets Firefox apart from other browsers, including other projects based on Mozilla's Gecko layout engine and most other browsers, which use interfaces native to their respective platforms (Galeon and Epiphany use GTK+; K-Meleon uses MFC; and Camino uses Cocoa). Many of these projects were started before Firefox, and probably served as inspiration.

The first sign of a Firefox-like project was a small application sample (presumably to demonstrate how to embed Gecko in another application) shipped with early milestone builds of Mozilla. Featuring only "back", "forward", and "stop" buttons and a URL field (no cache, no stored history, etc.), it was minimalistic and thus a lot lighter than Mozilla itself. Eventually, it was no longer shipped with Mozilla's binary builds.

Although the Mozilla Foundation had intended to make the Mozilla Suite obsolete and to replace it with Firefox, the Foundation continued to maintain the suite until April 12, 2006^[1] because it had many corporate users, as well as being bundled with other software. The Mozilla community (as opposed to the Foundation) continues to release new versions of the suite using the product name SeaMonkey to avoid any possible confusion with the original Mozilla Suite.

On February 5, 2004 the business and IT consulting company AMS categorized Mozilla Firefox (then Firebird) as a "Tier 1" (meaning "Best of Breed") open source product (Keating, 2004). This meant that AMS considered Firebird (as it was called at the time) to be virtually risk-free and technically strong.

[edit] Naming

The project which became Firefox started as an experimental branch of the Mozilla Suite called m/b (or mozilla/browser). When sufficiently developed, binaries for public testing appeared in September 2002 under the name Phoenix.

The Phoenix name was retained until April 14, 2003 when it was changed (after a short stint as Phoenix Browser) due to trademark issues with the BIOS manufacturer, Phoenix Technologies (who produce a BIOS-based browser called Phoenix FirstWare Connect). The new name, Firebird, was met with mixed reactions, particularly as the Firebird database server already carried the name. In late April, following an apparent name change to Firebird browser for a few hours, the Mozilla Foundation issued an official statement which stated that the browser should be referred to as Mozilla Firebird (as opposed to just Firebird). Continuing pressure from the Firebird community forced another change, and on February 9, 2004 the project was renamed Mozilla Firefox (or Firefox for short).

The name, "Firefox", was chosen for its similarity to "Firebird", but also for its uniqueness in the computing industry. To ensure that no further name changes would be necessary, the Mozilla Foundation began the process of registering Firefox as a trademark with the United States Patent and Trademark Office in December 2003. This trademark process led to a delay of several months in the release of Firefox 0.8 when the foundation discovered that in the UK Firefox had already been registered as a trademark for browsers by The Charlton Company. The situation was resolved when the foundation was given a license to use Charlton's European trademark.

The repeated renaming of the program prompted the development of the tongue-in-cheek extension "Firesomething", which allowed users to randomize the name on startup, giving it such satirical soubriquets as "Firegiraffe" or "Moonbadger".

[edit] Branding and visual identity

One of the most visible enhancements is the new visual identity of Firefox and Thunderbird. It has often been argued that free software is typically designed only by programmers — rather than graphic designers or usability gurus — and that it frequently suffers from poor icon and GUI design and lacks a strong visual identity. The early Firebird and Phoenix releases of Firefox were considered to have had reasonable visual designs, but were not up to the same standard as many professionally released software packages.

In October 2003, professional interface designer, Steven Garrity, wrote an article covering everything he considered to be wrong with Mozilla's visual identity. The page received a great deal of attention (it was slashdotted). The majority of the criticisms levelled at the article were along the lines of "where's the patch?", an open source way of saying "if you don't like it, you can fix it yourself."

Shortly afterwards, Garrity was invited by the Mozilla Foundation to head up the new visual identity team. The release of Firefox 0.8 in February 2004 saw the introduction of the new branding efforts, including new icons designed by Jon Hicks, who had previously worked on Camino. The logo was revised and updated later, fixing some flaws found when the logo was enlarged.

Blue globe artwork is distributed with Firefox source code, and is explicitly not protected as a trademark^[2]

The animal shown in the logo is a stylized fox, although "firefox" is considered to be a common name for the red panda. The panda, according to Hicks, "didn't really conjure up the right imagery", besides not being widely known. The logo was chosen for the purpose of making an impression, while not shouting out with overdone artwork. The logo had to stand out in the user's mind, be easy for others to remember and stand out while not causing too much distraction when among other icons. It was expected to be the final logo for the product.

The Firefox icon is a trademark used to designate the official Mozilla build of the Firefox software, and builds of official distribution partners.^[3] Although the core software is open source, the artwork (along with the quality feedback agent and parts of the installer) is not freely licensed without official permission from the developers. For this reason, Debian and other software distributors who distribute patched or modified versions of Firefox do not use the icon.

[edit] Delicious delicacies

A screenshot showing the "cookies are delicious delicacies" line

Early Firefox releases featured an options menu that described cookies by stating "Cookies are delicious delicacies".

The phrase was representative of the programmers' quirky sense of humor and a general reflection of the open source movement's unconventional approach. The phrase became something of a cult legend and was even featured in an O'Reilly computer book.

The original text was inserted by Blake Ross, one of the lead developers of Firefox, because, he says, "describing something so complicated in such a small space was quite frankly the last thing I wanted to worry about after rewriting the cookie manager".

However, in reflection of the growing acceptance and use of the Firefox browser in the Internet mainstream, the text was later changed. It was considered a bug and was "fixed" by Mike Connor to read "Cookies are pieces of information stored by web pages on your computer. They are used to remember login information and other data". The revision was regarded as more likely to be helpful for the less technically-oriented computer users who were now using Firefox - representing Mozilla's desire to appeal to mainstream users.

After this happened, the following remarks were made by Blake Ross over IRC to Mike Connor:

   <blake2> congratulations mconnor 
   <blake2> you just destroyed a legend!

The text became a popular in-joke and on August 2004, the Delicious Delicacies extension, which is no longer maintained and updated, was released by Jesse Ruderman. This extension restored the old description of cookies, available in several languages.

[edit] The road to 1.5

"Deer Park", the codename of the Firefox 1.1 Alphas, did not include Firefox branding.

On June 23, 2005, the Mozilla Foundation announced that Firefox 1.1 (which became Firefox 1.5) and other new Mozilla products will no longer support Mac OS X v10.1. This is intended to improve the quality of Firefox releases on Mac OS X v10.2 and above. Users of 10.1 may still use Firefox versions from the 1.0.x branch (e.g. Firefox 1.0.7).

Updated options window introduced in Firefox 1.5

Firefox 1.5 was released on November 30, 2005. The original plan was for a Firefox 1.1 and later a Firefox 1.5. After the first two 1.1 alpha builds, the Mozilla Foundation abandoned the 1.1 release plan and merged it with the planned feature set of 1.5 instead, with 1.5 being released later than was planned for 1.1. The new version resynchronised the code-base of the release builds (as opposed to nightly builds) with the core "trunk" which contains additional features not available in 1.0, as it branched from the trunk around the 0.9 release. As such, there has been a backlog of bug fixes between 0.9 and the release of 1.0, which are now available in 1.5. Version 1.5 implements a new Mac-like options interface, which has been the subject of much criticism from Windows and Linux users, with a "Sanitize" action to allow a person to clear their privacy related information without manually clicking the "Clear All" button. A user can clear all privacy-related settings simply by exiting the browser or using a keyboard shortcut, depending on their settings. Moreover, the software update system has been improved (with binary patches now possible). There are also improvements in the extension management system, with a number of new developer features.

Also, Firefox 1.5 has (partial) SVG 1.1 support, as shown in Mozilla's Bugzilla database. This unplanned movement may be due to the release of Opera 8.0 on April 19, 2005, which supports SVG Tiny.

Alpha builds of Firefox 1.5 (1.1a1 and 1.1a2) did not contain Firefox branding. They were labeled "Deer Park" (which was Firefox 1.5's internal codename) and contained a different program icon (see installation screenshot, right). This was done to dissuade end-users from downloading preview versions, which are intended for developers only.

[edit] Release history

Parts of this table are based on the Firefox roadmap.

Key:
Old Version	Current Version	Future Version

Browser Name	Gecko version	Version	Codename	Release date	Significant changes
Phoenix	1.2	0.1	Pescadero	September 23, 2002	First release; customizable toolbar, quicksearch.
		0.2	Santa Cruz	October 1, 2002	Sidebar, extension management.
		0.3	Lucia	October 14, 2002	Image blocking, pop-up blocking whitelist, tabbed browsing.
	1.3	0.4	Oceano	October 19, 2002	Themes, pop-up blocking improvements, toolbar customization.
	1.3	0.5	Naples	December 7, 2002	Multiple homepages, sidebar and accessibility improvements, history
Mozilla Firebird	1.5	0.6	Glendale	May 17, 2003	New default theme (Qute), bookmark and privacy improvements, smooth scrolling, automatic image resizing.
		0.6.1		July 28, 2003	Bugfix release.
		0.7	Indio	October 15, 2003	Automatic scrolling, password manager, preferences panel improvements.
		0.7.1	Three Kings	October 26, 2003	Bugfix release (Mac OS X only).
Mozilla Firefox	1.6	0.8	Royal Oak	February 9, 2004	Windows installer, offline working, bookmarks and download manager improvements, rebranded with new logo.
	1.7	0.9	One Tree Hill	June 15, 2004	New default theme (Winstripe), comprehensive data migration, new extension/theme manager, reduced download size, new help system, Linux installer, mail icon (Windows only).
		0.9.1		June 28, 2004	Bugfix release, updated default theme.
		0.9.2		July 8, 2004	Vulnerability patch (Windows only).
		0.9.3		August 4, 2004	Vulnerability patch.
		0.10 (1.0 PR)	Greenlane	September 14, 2004	("Preview Release") Bugs with higher complexity/risk, localization impact, RSS/Atom feed support, find toolbar, plugin finder.
		0.10.1		October 1, 2004	Vulnerability patch.
		1.0 RC1	Mission Bay	October 27, 2004	First release candidate.
		1.0 RC2	Whangamata	November 3, 2004	Second release candidate.
		1.0	Phoenix	November 9, 2004	Official Version 1.0 release. Official localized builds.
		1.0.1	Rose & Crown	February 24, 2005	Stability and security improvements.
		1.0.2		March 23, 2005	Stability and security improvements.
		1.0.3		April 15, 2005	Security and installer improvements.
		1.0.4		May 11, 2005	Vulnerability and DHTML regression patch.
		1.0.5		July 12, 2005	Vulnerability patch.
		1.0.6		July 19, 2005	Fix for extension API regression.
		1.0.7		September 20, 2005	Vulnerability patch and regression fix.
		1.0.8		April 13, 2006	Stability improvement and security fixes. End-of-life of 1.0.x product line.
	1.8	1.1a1	Deer Park Alpha 1 "Strippenkaart"	May 31, 2005	Support for SVG and canvas. "Sanitize" privacy feature. Improvements in JavaScript 1.5 and CSS 2/3. Broken website reporter tool.
		1.1a2	Deer Park Alpha 2	July 12, 2005	Blazing fast backwards and forwards (FastBack), drag-and-drop tab reordering, improved pop-up blocking, error pages instead of error dialogs.
		1.4	Firefox 1.5 Beta 1	September 9, 2005	New update system (binary patch). Prettier error pages, more Luna-like Winstripe theme (does not blend well with the Classic theme).
		1.4.1	Firefox 1.5 Beta 2	October 6, 2005	Improvements to automated update system, website rendering and performance. Several security fixes.
		1.5 RC1		November 1, 2005	First release candidate.
		1.5 RC2		November 10, 2005	Second release candidate.
		1.5 RC3		November 17, 2005	Third release candidate.
		1.5	Firefox 1.5 "Deer Park"	November 29, 2005	Official Version 1.5 release. Official localized builds. Identical to 1.5 RC3.
		1.5.0.1 RC1		January 19, 2006	First release candidate.
		1.5.0.1		February 1, 2006	Security and "reliability" improvements.
		1.5.0.2		April 13, 2006	Stability improvement, security fixes and native support for Intel-based Macintosh computers, aka universal binary.
		1.5.0.3		May 2, 2006	Security fix for a publicly disclosed denial of service weakness.
		1.5.0.4		June 1, 2006	Stability improvement and security fixes.
		1.5.0.5		July 26, 2006	Improvements to product stability, added changes for Frisian locale (fy-NL), several security fixes.
		1.5.0.6		August 2, 2006	Fixes a streaming Windows Media regression introduced by a security fix in version 1.5.0.5.
		1.5.0.7		September 14, 2006	Stability improvement and security fixes.
		1.5.0.8		November 7, 2006	Stability improvement and security fixes.
		1.5.0.9		December 19, 2006	Security and stability updates.
		1.5.0.10		February 23, 2007	Security and stability updates.
		1.5.0.11		March 20, 2007	Regressions fixes.
Mozilla Firefox 2	1.8.1	2.0a1	Bon Echo Alpha 1	March 22, 2006
		2.0a2	Bon Echo Alpha 2	May 12, 2006	Links defaults to open in new tab. Close button on every tab. Inline spell checking for text boxes. Session restoration when browser crash. Search suggestion for Google and Yahoo!. New search plugin manager and add-on manager. Web feed previewing. Bookmark microsummaries. Updates to the extension system. Support for Sherlock and OpenSearch. Support for SVG text using svg:textPath.
		2.0a3	Bon Echo Alpha 3	May 26, 2006	Anti-phishing protection. Search suggestions appear with search history in the search box for Google and Yahoo!. Support for client-side session and persistent storage.
		2.0b1	Firefox 2.0 Beta 1	July 12, 2006	Improved feed support. A new NSIS-based installer. JavaScript 1.7. Enhanced security and localization support for extensions.
		2.0b2	Firefox 2.0 Beta 2	August 31, 2006	New Winstripe theme refresh: New navigation icons, URL bar refresh (New Go button attached to the URL bar), Search bar refresh, Tab bar refresh, Alltabs button (used to view a popup list of all tabs open)
		2.0 RC 1		September 26, 2006
		2.0 RC 2		October 6, 2006
		2.0 RC 3		October 16, 2006
		2.0	Firefox 2 "Bon Echo"	October 24, 2006	Official Version 2.0 release. Official localized builds. Identical to 2.0 RC3.
		2.0.0.1		December 19, 2006	Stability improvements and security fixes.
		2.0.0.2		February 23, 2007	Stability improvements and security fixes.
		2.0.0.3		March 20, 2007	Regression fixes and security fixes.
		2.0.0.4			Stability improvements and security fixes.
Mozilla Firefox 3	1.9	3.0a1	Gran Paradiso Alpha 1	December 8, 2006	Cairo graphics library. Cocoa Widgets in OS X builds. Updated threading model. Changes to how DOM events are dispatched, how HTML object elements are loaded, and how web pages are painted. New SVG elements and filters, and improved SVG specification compliance. Windows 95, 98, ME and Mac OS X v10.2 are no longer supported. Moving DOM nodes between documents now requires a call to importNode or adoptNode as per the DOM specification.
		3.0a2	Gran Paradiso Alpha 2	February 7, 2007	Reflow refactoring, which led to ACID2 test compliance among many other fixes to layout bugs. Web Apps 1.0 API for changing stylesheets support. The inline-block and inline-table values of CSS 2.1's display property are now implemented. XML documents can now be rendered as they're downloaded instead of only after the full document has been loaded. Greatly improved Mac widgets support since Alpha 1. Improvements in the Cairo graphics layer. The non-standard JavaScript "Script" object is no longer supported.
		3.0a3	Gran Paradiso Alpha 3	March 23, 2007	Support for allowing web pages to store resources in the browser's offline cache. Support for Animated PNG images. Support for the "HTTPOnly" cookie extension which provides enhanced cookie privacy. Improvements to the precision of layout and scaling across many screen and printer resolutions.
		3.0	Firefox 3 "Gran Paradiso"	Q4 2007	Places (SQLite-based services for accessing and manipulating browser history and bookmarks, as well as annotating pages)
Mozilla Firefox 4	2.0	4.0			See Mozilla Firefox#Version 4.0

Three Kings, Royal Oak, One Tree Hill, Mission Bay, and Greenlane are all suburbs in Auckland, New Zealand; Whangamata is a small seaside town in the Coromandel Peninsula in New Zealand. The codenames were chosen from these suburb names by Ben Goodger, who grew up in Auckland. The other codenames included in the Firefox roadmap are derived from an actual roadmap of a journey through California to Phoenix, Arizona.

According to Ben Goodger, "Deer Park is not Deer Park, Victoria, but just a symbolic name: "I was riding LIRR a few weeks ago and saw the name go by and I thought it sounded nice". Therefore, this is likely a reference to Deer Park, New York, a CDP on Long Island.

[edit] Future development

Development of Firefox after version 2.0 is split over two milestones: version 3.0 and version 4.0. Firefox 3.0 is now in the development stage and is expected to be released in the fourth quarter of 2007. Development for the 3.0 releases takes place on the Mozilla trunk, with releases coming from the Mozilla 1.8.1 branch (2.0) and the Mozilla 1.9 branch (3.0).

Likely goals for Firefox include:

Tabbed browsing improvements
Specific options per-site
Extension system enhancements
Find toolbar, software update, search enhancements
Accessibility compliance
Download resuming, detection of signed executables

The new "Places" interface for Bookmark and History was removed from the 2.0 roadmap on April 28, 2006. However, it is likely that it will be part of 3.0.