Ten years flies by when you're constantly innovating, especially on the Web, where Mozilla's Firefox browser has now been available for a decade.
When Firefox 1.0 first hit the Internet on November 9, 2004, it was a very different online world, with Internet Explorer holding on to a seemingly insurmountable 90-plus percent market share. But with a brand-new design having launched last spring, a powerful 3D-gaming capable architecture underneath with asm.js/Emscripten, and a new, simpler syncing system added in just the past year, Firefox isn't slowing down.
Mozilla has also been producing an innovative Android browser, its Firefox OS smartphone operating system, and a developer-specific version of the browser. The version, which incorporates tools like WebIDE and the Firefox Tools Adapter, is available today, as announced on the hacks.mozilla.org site.
PCMag sat down with Mozilla's Vice President of Firefox, Johnathan Nightingale, last week to talk about the non-profit, open-source organization's plans for the big birthday bash and reflections on how far the project has come. The first (appropriately privacy-centered) present is a "Forget" button. It lets you quickly remove browsing history from the time period you specify, whether that's the last five minutes, hour, or all time.
When you launch Firefox on the 10th, you'll see a "10 Years Independent" social sharing page linked on the default home page, with options to share socially using the #chooseindependent and #fx10 hashtags. In the real world, a San Francisco cable car has been adorned with Firefox branding for the day:
The @firefox Cable Car is driving around #SF! Take a pic, get swag, and groove with us! #fx10 #ChooseIndependent pic.twitter.com/kl9GmzBEFc
— Ting Jung Lee (@CupofTJ) November 9, 2014
The anniversary Firefox will also add a search engine known for not tracking you—DuckDuckGo—as a built-in option, following a similar move from Apple with iOS on the iPhone 6. In other privacy work coming down the road, Nightingale said that Mozilla is working with Tor and other groups on the Polaris privacy project and on a feature similar to IE's Tracking Protection, which blocks third-party sites from sniffing your browsing behavior.
Other future directions for Firefox include a 64-bit version (only IE currently offers 64-bit performance on Windows), process separation for tabs like that implemented in IE and Chrome. And, of course, more speed. Nightingale noted that just last week, Firefox came out ahead of Chrome on Google's own Octane JavaScript benchmark, as documents on the arewefastyet.com site maintained by Firefox's JavaScript development team show. Nightingale pointed out that many of the creators of "large chucks" of JavaScript work for Mozilla.
One missing piece of Firefox's ecosystem is an iOS app, and Nightingale addressed this by saying that in actuality, any so-called browser app you see in the iTunes App Store is really just a wrapper around the stock Safari browser, as dictated by Apple, so you won't see performance or standard-support differences with any third-party iOS browsers.
Nightingale concluded our talk by reflecting. "When you think about the tenth birthday, and what's changed, one of the biggest things is that now there's competition," he said. "I'm delighted that Google and Microsoft and Apple feel like they have to compete with us on our terms. The first browser war ended with a near total monopoly, and we don't have that today. Now we've got to carry on education about and increasingly complex product."
For a deep dive into PCMag's Editors' Choice browser, read our full review of Firefox. You can download and try out the updated browser at Firefox.com.