Ten years ago today something happened that has had a significant impact on many millions of people across the world … Mozilla 1.0 was released.
Above all else Mozilla, and it’s leaner, fitter, offspring, Mozilla Firefox, is the most important piece of free (as in freedom) software ever produced. For sure, it stood on the shoulders of giants to get there, but by giving the world a real choice in browsers the Mozilla Foundation changed the rules for the Internet, forced Microsoft to get its act together and crushed that company’s attempts to bind us all into a proprietary software future (remember ActiveX anyone?) online.
It is probably going too far to say that without Mozilla there would be no Arab Spring, for instance, but maybe not by much. Because Mozilla and Firefox also taught the public that there were alternatives out there and so the future did not have to be about what ever Baby Blue said it was. And that willingness to experiment online is helping power the mass adoption of smart phones, which are the weapons of choice for online revolutionaries.
It is easy to forget how bad it had got before Mozilla came along … Internet Explorer was a truly atrocious application that was not updated for several years. Microsoft had no interest in open standards because it had no competition. Mozilla changed all that. Not instantly, but the pressure began immediately.
Related articles
- Mozilla loses Web technology guru Chris Blizzard (news.cnet.com)
- Crazy Geckos: Nitot on Mozilla’s post-Firefox mobile crusade (go.theregister.com)
- Windows RT will ban Firefox and Chrome, says Mozilla (csmonitor.com)
- A history of Mozilla browsers design (nicubunu.blogspot.com)
- Mozilla grudgingly adopts H.264 (theinquirer.net)
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