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From left to right, Mozilla’s director of mobile Stuart Parmenter, director of Firefox development Mike Beltzner, manager of Firefox’s front-end–features team Johnathan Nightingale and team lead of graphics Vladimir Vukićević. The foursome sits below a quilt made by Mozilla Foundation chairwoman Mitchell Baker.
Photo: Michael Calore

MOUNTAIN VIEW, California — Vladimir Vukićević was working at the Mozilla office when Firefox was first released into the wild.

“All of our servers melted instantly,” Vukićević says. “We spent an hour trying to get the downloads back up.”

Indeed, the anticipation around the release of Firefox 1.0 on November 9, 2004 — five years ago Monday — was electric.

Mozilla had already produced its own eponymous browser based on open source code in 2002, but it was largely considered a failure. Firefox was the organization’s great re-do, and its second attempt to unseat its biggest nemesis, Microsoft Internet Explorer.

A half-decade later, Firefox is no longer a scrappy upstart but a dominant player. Old rival IE still commands around 60 percent of the market share, but close to a quarter of the web now uses Firefox — a formidable number which speaks to its success as an open source project. At a time when nobody wanted to go toe-to-toe with Microsoft, thousands of disparate programmers rose to the challenge, landing Firefox on the short list of other open source triumphs like Wikipedia, Ubuntu Linux, WordPress and the web itself.

Successes aside, Firefox is now at a tipping point.

Five years ago, it was all about beating Microsoft. Left unchecked, the company was free to dictate what shape the web would take. Firefox’s popularity created a new market for web standards and forced Redmond to take open-web technologies seriously.

Now, Firefox faces a bigger struggle. It needs to continue to innovate and remain relevant in an ever-changing, and ever-more-competitive, landscape.

“When it was just us and Microsoft, the story was very simple — it was the little guy versus the giant,” says Mozilla’s Mike Beltzner, who oversees Firefox’s development. “Now you’ve got heavy hitters like Microsoft, Google and Apple all competing, which make the stories a lot more interesting.”

The web itself has changed significantly in the last five years, as well. It’s no longer just a network of connected documents, but a full-fledged platform filled with real applications that run in the browser and share data with one another.

“It’s hard to cast your mind back and think about what the internet was like in 2004,” says Beltzner. “Five years ago, there was no Google Maps. Gmail was very new. All these things — applications that are now parts of the web that we would never think couldn’t be there — were just not there. Most of the reason was that browsers weren’t yet being designed with all of these advanced capabilities.”

Firefox was one of the first browsers built for this new web filled with applications. As a result, it gained favor with developers and users. But it also encouraged fiercer competition.

“It’s not just that the platform has changed, there’s a whole ecosystem of great browsers now,” says Mozilla’s Johnathan Nightingale, manager of the Firefox front-end features team.

We’re in the middle of the second great browser renaissance, and Firefox is no longer the sole leader. Feature-wise, Apple’s Safari browser is neck and neck with Firefox. Internet Explorer is catching up quickly. Google released its Chrome browser in September 2008. Much like Firefox, it arrived with a huge fanfare and quickly proved to be the web’s new golden child — simpler, faster, better than everyone else.

Along with Chrome, Google launched a public relations campaign highlighting the benefits of using its browser to run web applications like Gmail and Google Docs. Google’s PR push underscored the importance of things like browser performance and speed among developers and the general public alike.

In short, Google brought sexy back to the browser.

“One of the things Chrome did is make the way everybody communicates about browser development more energetic and public,” Vukićević says. “Before Chrome, we were doing a lot of really interesting things, but we were having a hard time communicating that.”

Nightingale agrees that since then, Mozilla has gotten a lot better at building up excitement around new features in Firefox. The company has launched a Hacks blog that shows demos of all the latest technologies, and it posts videos — sometimes as many as three or four per week — showcasing the innovations coming out of its experimental Labs office.

“Compared to the world that just had IE6 in it, we’re able to generate excitement about what we offer much more clearly,” Nightingale says.

In response to the increased interest in new technologies, Mozilla has stepped up its release schedule, too. The wait between Firefox 2 and Firefox 3 was close to two years — an eon in web time.

“When Firefox 3 neared completion, people were tremendously Angsty that it was such a superior experience to Firefox 2, yet we hadn’t shipped it yet,” Nightingale says. “That’s what stung the most. There were all these great features, and we weren’t ready to give it to people yet. We had to change that.”

Mozilla took another year to push out Firefox version 3.5, which arrived in June. But now, the team is committed to delivering a new release every six months. Firefox 3.6 is due by the end of 2009.

“We can’t have another two years where we’re sitting on awesome stuff that the rest of the world doesn’t get to have,” Nightingale says.

Another cause for Angst around the release of Firefox 3 was its abundance of features, which some users saw as unnecessary bloat. Version 3 fixed many of the stability and performance problems of its predecessor, but Firefox’s transformation from 2004’s svelte browser to today’s full-bodied machine was only made more obvious by Chrome’s debut as a bare-bones speed demon.

Still, Chrome’s arrival has put increased support for open web technologies on everyone’s road map. The next versions of Firefox will continue down that path.

At the top of the list for Firefox’s future is better support for HTML5, the set of technologies — already heavily supported by Firefox, Chrome and Safari (but not IE) — that define how web pages are built and how web applications function. Also, Mozilla has thrown its weight behind two open source technologies, the Web Open Font Format (WOFF) and the Ogg Theora video format. Both enable new methods for displaying fonts on web pages and for playing videos in the browser which don’t rely on proprietary technologies like Microsoft’s Silverlight and Adobe’s Flash and AIR.

This commitment to tools that let developers build better web experiences without using plug-ins was one of the project’s core principles when it was first launched.

According to Nightingale, openness will continue to play a key role in shaping the browser’s future.

“We always ask, ‘What is it that people on the open web can’t do right now? What’s pushing them towards things like Adobe AIR and Silverlight, or other technologies that are single-vendor silos?”

When a developer loses the ability to view a web page’s source code (something you can’t easily do in Flash) they can’t see how web applications and complex interactions function. And, he says, that stymies further experimentation.

“The web is going to be an awesome place to innovate in five years, because we’re going to chase down every awesome development in the proprietary world and make sure it happens on the open web as well. If we fail, then we’ll end up in a place that’s less recognizable than the web today, a web filled with a bunch of internet-delivered Flash executables.”