Back in 2004, the Mozilla Foundation placed a two-page Firefox advocacy ad in The New York Times, featuring the names of 10,000 donators.
What I wasn’t expecting though, was this prominently featured quote:
“I installed Firefox on my laptop
today. It’s so fast — I never knew
there could be that much of a
difference.”
— Stephen Cropp, New Zealand
What a legend. I wonder if Mr. Cropp is still using Firefox, and what he’s up to these days.
Source: Hacker News
Pretty sure I went to school with that guy
I feel the logo has really aged well.
Looking at the logo on that page takes me back to when I first tried Firefox on an early android phone.
2004 doesn’t seem long enough ago for Firefox 1.0. I’m sure Firefox had a major market share around then, but I’m also sure I never used Netscape Navigator. By 2004 I had built and run websites (though I was never very good at it, and that never changed).
Did Firefox 0.X get decent uptake?
This post is messing with my memory of those times.
You might be thinking of Mozilla Application Suite (or just Mozilla, as it was known at the time), which was born out if Netscape. It included an HTML editor as well (and email and IRC as well), and it was seen as bloated, so they made the browser standalone and called it Phoenix, which was then renamed to Firebird due to a trademark conflict with Phoenix BIOS, and again changed to Firefox (due to a conflict with Firebird database).
I don’t recall what the market share was at the time, but I do recall it being fairly popular - at least in the tech circles anyways, prior to 1.0. I even printed out a T-Shirt with the Firefox logo to celebrate the release, with the text “Dump IE, Get Firefox”, and used to wear it all the time proudly. Might need to make a new T-Shirt now with the text “Dump Chrome, Get Firefox”…
I don’t think I ever used Mozilla Application Suite. It seems that IE had over 90% market share, so probably I was just using IE and not even thinking about anything else until discovering Firefox and assuming it had always existed.
This site (video at top) has Firefox at about 3% market share in 2004. They cracked 10% in 2006, and by 2009 they had over 30%. By that point Chrome was coming onto the scene, which mostly eroded IE, and it wasn’t until 2011 that FF was back under 30%. Then by 2012 Chrome was the top browser.
For some reason, in my mind Firefox has always had about 30% market share until recently. But it seems they only spent about 2 years over 30%, so their popularity was a lot more fleeting than I remember.
I even printed out a T-Shirt with the Firefox logo to celebrate the release, with the text “Dump IE, Get Firefox”, and used to wear it all the time proudly. Might need to make a new T-Shirt now with the text “Dump Chrome, Get Firefox”…
That’s great! I can’t say I’ve ever had enough passion for anything to get a T-shirt printed. And I don’t much fancy explaining it to people:
- [in 2004] Why Firefox over IE? Well there are only 2 real choices, and Firefox follows web standards while IE doesn’t.
- [in 2023] Why Firefox over Chrome? Well, Chrome renders websites using something called Chromium, there are dozens of viable browser options these days and virtually every one uses Chromium to render websites. This gives the developer of Chromium the power to do whatever they like, because 90% of users use web browsers rendering with Chromium. The main developers of Chromium are Google, and Google is using their monopoly status to provide free tools to website owners and real life companies so they can track you wherever you go, whatever you do, on the internet and in real life, even if you are on websites that aren’t Google owned. When people try to stop them tracking them they change browser code to try to stop it, or propose new ways of tracking, which flow out to most of the 90% of users using Chromium browsers. It’s bad that Google knows everything you do because they aren’t a search company and you aren’t their customer, you’re their product and they are an ad company. They take money in order to manipulate you into spending your money on things they want you do while ensuring you think you have free will. Firefox is the only major browser not using Chromium.
It’s really a lot more of a mouthful than it was in 2004.
Haha, that’s indeed a mouthful, but I think that works well in my favour. I’m very quiet IRL and not good at making small talk, so wearing a T-shirt like that makes for a great conversation starter. I can go on and on about topics that I’m passionate about, so if someone asks “why”, I’ll be more than happy to unload on them. :)
I used to be quiet. Then I went through a phase of being a chatty person to colleagues. Now I’ve worked 95% from home for the past couple of years and now I’m back to being the quiet one 😆
In my memory it was Firebird for quite a while before it rebranded to Firefox. Long enough that I felt sceptical about the change - like the Firebird brand was strong enough that they were making a mistake.
Actually, looking back, it was only Firebird for less than a year…
The years were so much longer when we were younger 🙂
I’ve come full circle, and now use Firefox on both my PC and smartphone, mostly so I can use adblockers. It’s a great platform to this day.
