Hey Mashable and Wired… Firefox is not 10!

By On September 26, 2012 · 11 Comments

So apparently Mashable and Wired are under the belief that Firefox turned 10 today but in reality we just celebrated Firefox’s 7th Birthday last year and next month we will celebrate its 8th Birthday on November 9th. Mozilla Firefox 1.0 was release on November 9th 2004.

Screenshot from 2012 09 26 014844 1024x575 Hey Mashable and Wired... Firefox is not 10!

Sorry Mashable… You got it wrong!

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  • vxr

    firefox 1.0 turned 7, but the project itself is much older according to my memories and it is indeed 10 according to wikipedia (despite name changes): “binaries for public testing appeared in September 2002 under the name Phoenix”

    • Benjamin Kerensa

      Mozilla officially recognizes Firefox’s Birthday as November 9th 2004 see here:
      http://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2011/11/09/celebrating-7-years-of-firefox-with-the-newest-and-cutest-mozillians/
      https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2010/11/09/happy-6th-birthday-firefox/

      This has always been the official recognized date by Mozilla and in practice although yes in technicality there was Phoenix in 2002 but Firefox itself did not become a project until 2004.

      • Michael

        You mean Firefox didn’t become an official Mozilla project until then. Clearly the project that became Firefox did exist 10 years ago.

        This is suggested by the URL “http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/releases/0.1.html”. Obviously the URL at that time wouldn’t have had “Firefox” on it, but changing the name of something doesn’t make it a new thing.

        Giving software a “birthday” doesn’t really make sense, because software isn’t “born”, and which point is the equivalent of a birth is clearly arguable.

      • Alereon

        I think that dating Firefox from 1.0 shows a lack of respect for the contributions of the community members that worked hard to get the project to release-quality, at time without a certainty of success, I suspect. Those two years of Phoenix and Firebird were full of amazing progress and they deserve recognition.

        • Benjamin Kerensa

          What about the contributions from Netscape years before Phoenix?

    • Jamie

      Yeah but Phoenix was kind of like an Alpha Testing type product it was not a stable first release like Firefox 1.0

  • http://adblockplus.org/ Wladimir Palant

    They really meant the project, not the software, the articles make that perfectly clear. And there was indeed a Phoenix 0.1 release ten years ago. It doesn’t really matter what Mozilla celebrates – taking that release as the starting point of the project is perfectly valid. Otherwise you would have to consider some projects “not born at all” just because they stay below 1.0 for years, for whatever reasons. For example, Adblock Plus 1.0 release was a little less than four years ago – but it was just a milestone, one out of many. The project itself is more than six years old however and I always consider the first public release to be the starting point.

    Note that Firefox isn’t “just another product of the Mozilla project”, it was always a distinctly separate project.

  • http://twitter.com/ianmthomasuk Ian Thomas (@ianmthomasuk)

    I guess you could say the conception was 10 years ago, although you could argue it’s even older if you take account of the reliance on Mozilla and Netscape code.

  • http://home.kairo.at/blog/ Robert Kaiser

    The problem is where you put the “birthday”. The official one is when we shipped 1.0, but you could see the first release of the project the turned out to be Firefox (and that’s what went around right now), and you could even see its inception which from what I see in the original CVS history seems to be April 1 of 2002. All depends on the point of reference. ;-)

    • Benjamin Kerensa

      Sure and we could also say Firefox was really born during Netscape days?

  • http://gravatar.com/jeremybicha Jeremy Bicha
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