The Birth of Firefox

In the last part we saw that by 2002 Mozilla 1.0 had shipped but had few users. The Mozilla suite had everything: a browser, an email client, a web page editor and more. But having everything made it heavy and complex. A group of community members concluded that ordinary users wanted something else: a browser, just a browser, light, fast and simple.

Three names for one browser

On 23 September 2002, according to Mozilla's official timeline, Phoenix 0.1 was released, the first official version of a standalone browser that would later be renamed Firefox. The phoenix, the bird reborn from its own ashes, was a fitting name for a project rising from an apparent failure.

The naming had its own story. Phoenix was first renamed Firebird and then, according to the same timeline, became Firefox in February 2004 with version 0.8. The timeline says that version supported 29 languages, became a hit with web developers, and that downloads began to accelerate.

Before the storm

In October 2004 the Mozilla Foundation released a Firefox Preview Release. According to the foundation's official announcement, more than eight million people downloaded it, contributing significantly to the final phase of development. What Netscape had promised years before, harnessing the power of thousands, had become real in the form of millions of testers.

9 November 2004

Finally, on 9 November 2004, Firefox 1.0 was released as a free download for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux, in over a dozen languages with more on the way, according to the official announcement. Mitchell Baker, the foundation's president, said the milestone was made possible by "the tireless effort of hundreds of community volunteers and developers around the world."

The announcement listed features that seem obvious today but were new to many then: built-in pop-up blocking that let "users-not websites" decide; tabbed browsing to load many pages in one window; help in spotting fraudulent sites; integrated search in the toolbar; and more than 100 extensions anyone could use to customise their browser. Moving bookmarks and passwords over from other browsers was made easy too.

A community that bought an ad

Perhaps the most memorable scene in this story happened not in code but in a newspaper. Spread Firefox, a volunteer-run advocacy site that the foundation said had over 50,000 registered members, organised a fundraising campaign. The result was a two-page ad in the 16 December 2004 edition of The New York Times, featuring the names of thousands of supporters worldwide.

Users paying money for a free piece of software so that others would hear about it: that was an image no advertising budget could buy. According to Mozilla's history page, Firefox was downloaded over 100 million times in less than a year, and competition returned to the browser market, competition that, the same page says, accelerated innovation and improved the internet for everyone.

The turning point

The turning point of this series was focus. For years open code alone had failed to shake the market. When a small group decided to do one thing brilliantly and turned the community into the product's champions, the same open code became a beloved product.

Lesson for businesses

Openness alone doesn't win; a product users love does. Simplify, and stay focused on the user's core need.

Second, happy users are the best marketers. Give them the tools and the opportunity to tell your story themselves.

Third, an apparent failure isn't always the end. The assets built in the hard years, the code, the community and the foundation, were exactly what made the later success possible.

End of series. Three stories, one shared message: behind every piece of open software stand people with different motives; and clear rules, humble leadership and a focus on users shape its fate.

منابع / Sources

• "Timeline", MozillaWiki, n.d. — https://wiki.mozilla.org/Timeline
• "Mozilla Foundation releases the highly anticipated Mozilla Firefox 1.0 web browser", Mozilla Press Center, 2004-11-09 — https://blog.mozilla.org/press/2004/11/mozilla-foundation-releases-the-highly-anticipated-mozilla-firefox-1-0-web-browser/
• "Mozilla Foundation places two-page advocacy ad in The New York Times", Mozilla Press Center, 2004-12-15 — https://blog.mozilla.org/press/2004/12/mozilla-foundation-places-two-page-advocacy-ad-in-the-new-york-times/
• "History of the Mozilla Project", Mozilla, n.d. — https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/history/details/