Analysis:
As a new web browser, FireFox has achieved great success at present, and its popularity is almost equal to that of Microsoft IE, which has dominated the browser market for several years. As we reported before, the market share of FireFox has exceeded 65,438+00% in some fields. In Europe, such as Hungary, Germany and Finland, the market share of this browser is as high as 22%, 24% and 30% respectively.
Asa Dotzler is the community coordinator of Mozilla Foundation and plays an important role in organizing the FireFox open source browser community. At first, he was a volunteer and employee of Netscape, and later he joined the Mozilla Foundation. Below, let him tell us about the development of FireFox, and let us see how this open source browser has grown from scratch in the confrontation with IE.
1998 65438+1October: Netscape Communications announced its plan to release the browser source code, with the aim of "inspiring the innovative ability of thousands of developers on the Internet".
1May, 998: Netscape released the source code of Communicator 5.0 on mozilla website for download.
1998165438+1October: AOL announced the acquisition of Netscape (1999 completed in May).
2000165438+1October: Netscape 6 was released, but many bugs were found.
June 2002: Mozilla 1.0 released. This Inter package includes a web browser, an email and newsgroup client, an IRC client and an HTML editor.
September 2002: independent web browser Phoenix 0. 1 released.
April 2003: Phoenix was renamed Firebird due to a trademark dispute.
May 2003: AOL agrees to use Microsoft's browser as the default browser for its online service users in the next seven years.
July 2003: AOL fired 50 employees of its Netscape subsidiary related to the development of web browsers. Mozilla Foundation started to operate, with AOL contributing 2 million US dollars and Lotus founder mitch kapor contributing 300,000 US dollars.
February 2004: Mozilla Foundation was forced to rename Firebird Firefox again because it conflicts with the brand name of another open source project.
September 2004: Firefox 1.0 PR released. Almost at the same time, the SpreadFirefox community market website was launched, which helped Mozilla Foundation achieve the goal that the download volume of Firefox exceeded 10 in10 days.
June 5438+1October 2004: Mozilla Foundation appeals to its supporters to donate money to buy a full-page advertisement in The New York Times to promote the launch of Firefox 1 1.0 in October. In a short period of 10 days, the fund-raising activities * * * received a total of $250,000 from 10000 people.
2004165438+1October: released by Firefox 1.0.
65438+February 2004: new york Times published relevant advertisements.
May 2005: IBM encourages employees to use Firefox, allowing them to download software from the company's internal servers and get technical support from the company's service desk.
Dozler finally said: "I am confident that the company will adopt a dual browser strategy in the future. When a virus affects one of the browsers, they will want to have two browsers. There is no doubt that developers are now planning that their next-generation projects should be able to run across browsers. "