20 Years Ago Today: 'Firefox Browser Takes on Microsoft' | Hacker News Reader

20 Years Ago Today: 'Firefox Browser Takes on Microsoft'

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35 pointsMilnerRoute18 comments

20 years is a long time, but except for a few years when I used Chrome, I'm still using Firefox today.

And 20 years ago, who would have suspected that the obscure Konqueror browser from KDE and its KHTML engine would then be used to create WebKit and other engines such as the one that power Google Chrome...

Not to dent Slashdot for linking to Web Archive for the BBC link, but credit to the BBC for still keeping the article up.[0]

[0] http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/3993959.stm

This was the greatest success ever. All the grassroots campaigning was quite successful. Changed everything to needing to be standards compliant and that let KHTML then WebKit then Blink take over the world.

People were installing it on office computers, kids on their parents’ and changing the icon to look like IE. What a fun time!

20 years ago I loved Firefox. tabs and extensions were amazing. today, it feels slow and uncomfortable to use. I tried too many times to like it again. for me Vivaldi today is what Firefox was 20 years ago.

I've been on board when it was called Firebird (before someone noticed that name was already claimed by a RDBMS project, so it was renamed to Firefox), and I still am.

It's been a while. 20 years ago, what Firefox offered to me was a) tabbed browsing, and b) an ad blocker that was a total game changer; some sites back then were so overloaded with annoying ads, popups, blinking, etc, Futurama made fun of it.

Let us hope that 20 years from now, the Firefox is still fierce.

I started with Mosaic, which I think became Internet Explorer, but paid for a copy of Netscape when that came out. Drifted back to IE for reasons I don't remember (probably just what was on work machines), then Firefox, then Chrome.

To be honest I don't really care so much any more.

I remember being on 0.7 and thinking things were getting worse with 1.0. Not sure what it was other than the simplicity. But now that computers have zero issues keeping up it’s plenty performative and I love using it even more.

Today: Firefox gives up on itself.

We need new Firefox leadership right away so it goes back to being a credible alternative rather than a fanboy browser.

Firefox of today has little to do with the Firefox of 20 years ago. Most of the original core team isn't there anymore. It's now been hijacked by activists spending like drunken sailors on frivolities due to the Google infinite money glitch.

Many large projects seem to decay like this and fall into activism. I'm glad KDE has avoided this and keeps improving.

And if we don’t start using browsers other than Chrome we are back in the same boat.

Agreed. I’m very closely watching https://ladybird.org/

Been a user since the Mosaic days on XWindows, through Netscape, Mozilla, Phoenix, and Firefox. There was definitely a time when it was falling behind and getting slow, but then it was reinvigorated and is still my daily driver.

I get real tired of seeing the whinging about Pocket, the CEO’s pay, etc. in every. single. thread. about Firefox, from people who completely ignore that all other options are just Chrome.

Firefox beat microsoft totally and absolutely.

As a Firefox fanboy, who will never yield regardless of what Mozilla may do, I think it's more realistic to say Chrome beat Internet Explorer in the end. Edge isn't built on Gecko, but KHTML.

It's accurate to say Firefox beat IE in that it freed the lock IE had on the web. By 2001 the majority of web browsers was IE6. Many parts of the web were being locked down behind IE/Windows specific features like ActiveX plugins and VBScript. Lots of intranet interfaces were built around IE6. It became as much a business staple as Microsoft Office.

By the end of the 90s both Microsoft and Netscape had kind of given up on browser engines being performant and relegated complex/demanding UIs to native plug-ins. Anyone not wanting to use plug-ins (Java included) to make a web app had to use frame-based SSR which was very tricky to get right. Even when the design and implementation were good performance of the browser sucked.

Firefox doubled down on performance of the rendering and JavaScript engines. Combined with XHR it was actually possible to make good web apps without using plug-ins of frame-y kludges. By not supporting ActiveX Firefox was also immune to whole classes of exploits ravaging IE at the time.

Firefox breaking IE's hold on the web set the foundation for the rise of Chrome. Breaking IE's hold on the web meant at release WebKit on iOS and Android was a useful browser engine that could handle real websites rather than a bunch of broken plug-in icons or being limited to WAP/"Lite" sites like all previous mobile devices.

A web requiring IE-only technologies like ActiveX and VBScript was never going to be accessible to mobile devices or non-Windows platforms.

Firefox beat Internet Explorer and Chrome, in turn, beat Firefox. In an alternate universe, Google could have backed Firefox instead of building their own browser, making Firefox number one. Mozilla was and still is heavily supported by Google.

Gecko may indeed be the reason why it didn't happen. Supposedly, it is an engine with a lot of baggage and hard to work with, which is the reason why there are so many KHTML/Webkit/Chromium/... based browsers and components and so few based on Gecko. Google wanted a fast browser to support their webapp ecosystem, they found it was better to use Webkit as a base. Firefox eventually caught up, but it took many years, and we still don't have an easily integrated Gecko-based engine.

Wow I didn't realize slashdot had become such a cesspool. Yikes.

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