Firefox Turns Five Today Comments

I remember first using Firefox when it was in its Firebird incarnation. Its unique selling point back then was its svelte nature. While Internet Explorer had become bloated, Firebird/fox came in a small installer, and was very speedy and quick - pared down just to the browser basics. Oh, and it had this new feature called tabs as well.

Over the years new features have been added, and some might say it's become bloated with the years, but I still remember its birth fondly and look at the long way it's come in such a short time. Heaven knows what Internet Explorer would be like without the competition provided by Firefox - would we have tabs, and would I.E. be as standards compliant as it is now?

Anyway, enough nostalgia, happy birthday Firefox :)

@Gordon
You kind of make it sound like FireFox introduced Tabbed browsing but Opera was the real innovator.

@Gordon
I need to sit down you just described me as "hardcore" and I thought it was ease of use and a low memory hog that determined my decision.

@Pbryanw: No, that was just to attract the mozilla users. Firefox's big feature was it's plug-ins, it was a huge memory hog compared to IE6, Opera, Maxthon, Avant etc.

@ravmania: Firefox never introduced anything. Like Apple, Mozilla's strategy was to take away the features you had to learn to use and package is all up in an interface without any options. Even today Firefox lacks many features that other browsers had five years ago.

For performance I was talking about version 1 and before. I know the latest versions are better.

As for add-ons, they're great for certain things but I'd rather use a browser where the important interface features are built in so they integrate with the rest of the system.