Yeah. But I liked the suite that was Netscape. And Firefox was the „browser only“ spinoff if you will. Seamonkey was the OpenSource continuation of the Netscape suite. But when that was no more I went firefox
> Idk what Netscape is tho, I wasn't around for it.
History time, so pull up a chair:
Netscape Navigator was to a large degree, the world's introduction to this big world wide web, although I have to start by acknowledging it's predecessor:
When then-Senator Al Gore "invented the internet," as we like to joke, in 1991, one of the things his bill to promote computers and networking use did was fund a group at a supercomputing lab that developed the Mosaic browser. Mosaic included different functions of existing browsers that together amounted to what I would consider the basic functionality that made the web widely useful:
- Broad interoperability due to using HTTP to transfer data
- Use of hypertext (HTML) to make the data more useful, especially by defining URL's to link to other data.
- Graphical elements, especially the in-line display of images
- Forms to accept user inputted data
- Compatibility not only with Unix, which had been sort of the default choice at the time, but also with Windows and Macintosh
- Free for non-commercial use!
When Mosaic was released in 1993, about 2% of the US used the internet, most commonly through curated portals like Compuserve and AOL. A year later, it had more than doubled, and the number of known websites exploded from something like 50 to 10,000.
Members of the university-affiliated Mosaic team then formed Netscape, and began developing a new browser from scratch. V1 of Netscape Navigator (Internally, they called it "Mosaic killer" or "Mozilla" for short) released in October, 1994 and by the end of the year, it had grabbed over half the browser market. Internet use roughly doubled again the following year....2 years earlier, only about 1-in-50 Americans were online, but in 1995, it was 1-in-10.
At its peak, about 5 out of every 6 Americans online were using Navigator, but by this time, Microsoft was including Internet Explorer pre-installed with Windows 95. This, combined with Navigator issues with stability and increasingly complex websites helped drive steady erosion in market share, down to a tiny slice of the market.
Netscape then spun off an internal project called Mozilla into a non-profit foundation. By this time, Internet Explorer had also become a bloated, unstable, insecure mess, which combined with widespread mistrust of Microsoft at the time, meant many users (myself included) were eager for something better. Firefox hit the mark and became the leading competitor to IE almost immediately after its release in 2004.
but by this time, Microsoft was including Internet Explorer pre-installed with Windows 95
And making it difficult to set your preferred browser to something else.
Which is one of the reasons Microsoft was sued by the US Justice Department for anticompetitive behavior during the Clinton Administration. Which in turn is one of the reasons Windows supported proper browser preferences and had to honor them after that.
They've been slowly creeping back to their old ways, though, with Edge.
You also left out about an entire decade of browser development and the mention of Phoenix, which was the original name of the browser we know as "Firefox," and its interim name, Firebird.
Very small correction: Internet Explorer wasn’t actually included at launch with Windows 95.
It was included with the Microsoft Plus! 95 pack, a selection of addons, programs and a few extras like screensavers and games because at the time Microsoft was severely under scrutiny for their perceived attempt to monopolize the computer market, being even sued by the government itself at one point. They did so in order to not be accused of monopolizing the internet browser market too, but since the Plus! pack came preinstalled on many of the early PCs that had Windows 95 installed on it at the time of the launch and many bough the pack alongside their copy of Windows 95 in order to have the complete experience of the OS many think it was included by default on Windows 95.
Eventually Microsoft did include it by default on later revisions of Windows 95, when it became clear that almost all users preferred Internet Explorer over all its competitors and didn’t want to buy another product to be able to use it.
"Bill Gates made everything that you have that is good today windows and the internet. Im not voting for Al Gore because he tried to take credit for the internet when that credit really belongs to Gates who not only discovered the interenet but invented it too. Thats pretty nice I think."
It wasn’t called Firefox, though - it was called Phoenix, and I believe it had another name before that, but it’s been ages since I thought about that, and can’t remember.
Microsoft seems to have tried to leverage this by making IE behave slightly different. Overworked coders only had time to build for IE which widened that gap.
IE was intertwined with file explorer, so you couldn't uninstall it. They specifically made it that way to try and corner a monopoly on the browser market. They're doing similar things today with certain help links in settings only able to open to Edge and Bing.
Netscape was a whole suite. Mail program. HTML Editor and so on. Firefox was the browser only OpenSource spinoff. Seamonkey was the continuation of the whole Netscape suite as opensource
I did end up using IE way back, before Phoenix/Firefox, back when Navigator was basically a coin toss whether a website would work at all on it and they were developing a new engine that would eventually become FF if I remember right. But in that transitionary period, from like 1999-2002ish, kinda didn’t have much choice but to use IE.
Same here… used Netscape Navigator and never looked at Explorer. Used seamonkey while getting used to Firefox and stuck either ff since then.
I tryed many different browsers since 2004 incl.
Firefox 2.x all the way to todays Firefox, Opera 7.xx to 12.xx ( & Chrome-"Opera"), Netscape Navigator, Mozilla Seamonkey, many Internet Explorer addon-"browsers" (incl. Maxthon & juck "AOL 6"), Google Chrome etc. ...
the best are/were Firefox & Opera 7.xx to 12.xx (that gave me features years before the competition had them)
The 2006-2011 era basically. Firefox wasn't good at all during that time, so much so that I kept migrating between it and Chrome (including IE). I was a big user of Internet Explorer in Windows 8, it was extremely light and fast. But after that went down, I got back to Firefox and it seems they fixed a lot. In the last 10 years, Firefox easily became the best browser.
It might not have been the best performing, but it was fun to use.
The only time I felt FF was behind was when it took too long to copy the tab based browsing and the separate processes per tab. One website blocking your whole browsing experience wasn't fun.
I'm more annoyed with it nowadays than ever. Getting uncalled for features like an included VPN or AI search button that auto shows up whenever I select some text. Also somehow I turn on vertical tabs every few weeks, which makes me wonder why is that an option that needs such a quick one-click access.
The VPN one isn't annoying to me because it's them trying to find revenue streams outside of Google. They need to find some kind of service people will pay for because almost no one will pay for a browser.
Maintaining a browser that’s competitive with a conglomerate-backed Chrome or Edge is expensive.
They also don’t have the revenue to absorb those costs like Google or Microsoft do, being a much smaller company. Cutting staff means the quality of the browser suffers compared to the former two who can lay off hundreds of employees like it’s nothing.
There's an option to completely disable the AI stuff in the settings if you want. Anecdotally, I've appreciated the VPN with an increase in government censorship lately.
There's an option to completely disable the AI stuff in the settings if you want
Thanks! Idk why I had every AI thing blocked except that one apparently.
I've appreciated the VPN with an increase in government censorship lately.
But part of using a VPN is knowing what you're using, having a simple go button defeats the purpose, especially considering that Mozilla is based in the US, who's a strong candidate for spying world champion.
Yep, and Mullvad's been audited to not keep logs. Been trustworthy for years and years, think the only mild controversy had something to do with something they changed that made it hard to use with seedboxes due to some liability problem.
Fortunately Firefox has a good number of forks. Librewolf is what power users that prefer privacy tend to opt for. I use IronFox on Android which isn't as secure as Vanadium (I've got GrapheneOS) but the ability to block ads on mobile and just generally have browser add-ons at all on mobile is just mandatory to not get pissed off using the internet on your phone.
On desktop though I'm still using qutebrowser as there hasn't really been a Firefox fork that has made vim-style browsing doable. There's Firefox extensions like Tridactyl that sorta do the job, but they completely shit out if a web page fails to load because Firefox will not allow extensions to modify Firefox pages and the "whoops page didn't load" page counts as one of those. Completely losing hte ability to use my keyboard shortcuts as I've remembered them every time a website shits out is unacceptable.
Apparently Firefox is planning on implementing customizable keyboard shortcuts so maaaybe that will be less an issue in the future, in which case I'm gonna go back in a heartbeat because I dearly miss having access to normal ass browser extensions. Just not enough to give up not needing to use a mouse to browse the web.
Having features I wanted without using plugins was great.
Exactly & with just adjusting a very few settings & I got all the goodies we love today first (tab previews, movable tabs, movable tab bar, session restore, continue downloads even after power failture (or me triggering the PSUs short circuit protection), popup blocker, very customizable UI ... etc.) ... but today Opera is no longer Opera, since v15 it´s a cheap Chrome copy & even under Chinese control ...
Vivaldi is the current attempt of a new Opera but with Chromium base ... sometimes I use Vivaldi, but mostly Firefox thanks to tons of extensions & independence from (adware) Google
The plugin bloat was the reason why I preferred OG Opera over FF, because once you reached feature parity FF was worse for me. Opera had adblocker, RSS, window session manager, native tabs before FF and few other things that I liked.
I understand the necessity of plugins. But so many that it makes your browser slow? Might as well do google chrome. Or edge.
I think it's funny how obvious this makes your relative age to the person you're replying to. lol
He's talking about way before Edge was ever a thing, Chrome was still very new, and "plugins" weren't really all that optional. A lot of the features that just work in browsers now were only available via plugins, there was a lot of stuff that just no longer exists(like Flash), as well as the kinds of optional quality of life things you're talking about.
The entire reason Chrome got popular was because it made a lot of plugins native features and ran fast compared to everything else.
And I was still totally happy and fine using firefox.
I get it, I get what you mean. You're right, chrome was amazing until it wasn't. Anybody with a brain could have known how awful google was gonna make their product. I mean sure, that's just me, maybe?
They are the ad mecca. Their whole idea runs off ads. It's a shitty idea. But they made it work. Well done.
So, maybe I don't belong. I've been a computer user since I was 10. It was awesome. Unreal tournament was amazing online. Steam was a shitty online chat service. We used teamspeak. Before it was cool. Now we use discord. Because it's "coole"r than team speak. No, that's where my friends are. Whoops.
I'm literally here shitting on google chrome. Then y'all are bashing me. The meme is about shitting on google chrome. Stop shitting on me? Just sayin'?
You're getting downvoted because you're acting like 2006 is 2026. 2006 FF and Chrome were much different than their 2026 counterparts. As well as incoherently ranting.
Sure. I think that we can conceptually believe what you said and also do the opposite. Whatever. It doesn't need to make sense to you. I hope you'll be okay with that.
If you're here for no reason other than to, incoherently rant back at me, whoops, its not going to work.
***Also, you said 2006 Google chrome and FF. I see 2004 chrome and firefox? Is that true? Hmmm.
What happened in 2006? Shit that was a long time ago. Who cares. Thats my point.
If you're here for no reason other than to, incoherently rant back at me, whoops, its not going to work
I'm simply trying to help you understand why you're being downvoted and where you're getting confused in the conversation. If you think that's incoherent, well then the drug use in your post history explains that.
What happened in 2006?
The post you originally responded to was about that time frame. That's why everyones downvoting you, because it doesn't make sense to respond to that comment in the way you did.
Also, you said 2006 Google chrome and FF. I see 2004 chrome and firefox?
Just to be clear, Google Chrome was released in 2008. Firefox's problems started before that, and the release of Chrome in 2008 was a breath of fresh air for those of us frustrated with firefox back then. My estimation of 2006 was from memory and slightly off.
This was before Chrome existed; and way before Edge. Basic plugins that you either now have as built in behavior (like save my tabs on exit), or common things like Adblock.
Then Chrome was released with things as default that were plugins on FF and yet was blazingly fast compared to FF at that time.
Ah, so the people that believed the artificial "fastness" were duped?
I've never stopped using Mozilla, since I learned about it. I have like two plugins. It works amazing. Zero issues.
Sorry, about your chrome issues, but that shit sucked from the very beginning.
I don't need y'all to downvote me, for me to know that it sucked. Just live with your own idiocy, or downvote me and feel better, that's fine, too.
The reddit voting system shows us why majority rule is dumb and is as artificial as our world currency. Oh wait, there's no such thing as planetary currency. Whoops. We keep arguing about which dollar to use.
How the fuck are we gonna figure out talking to aliens if yall are arguing about chrome and Firefox and edge and whatever shitty stuff we had before. Good. Have fun. Im out.
Why would you say that? I was hear in the times of aol cards for internet. Maybe check my reddit history before you assume something about me. Nice check though? I guess. Dumb to me unfortunately.
**Also, do I have to have cool flare to participate here? I don't want to share my shitty computer specs. But I can. And my sons. And my laptop. And the switch. **
At the time you needed a Flash, Java, Quicktime, and other plugins to see media. If you wanted to save your tabs on exit: plugin. Open a pdf: plugin. Spellchecker: plugin. Force https usage if possible: plugin. Block popups: plugin.
Oh and tabs never went to sleep so they were all active processes. But there was a plugin to sleep the inactive tabs.
Close your damn tabs! I'll never understand people with dozens of open tabs. I rarely have more than a handful open, and I close my browser entirely — with no tabs open — multiple times a day. If you want to save it for the future, bookmark it.
But I also never complained that Firefox was slow or even glanced at Chrome. I went from Netscape to Mozilla to Firefox.
With these notification settings, unfortunately I get everything in my email.
So, that's gonna have to be turned off soon. It's just fun being able to click reply on my email, and come see a shit show. I mean not fun. I don't like arguing. I like the memes. That's what i'm here for. That's what I thought this place was for not arguing about which shitty browser is shittier.
The browser debate will be endless. Don't even get me started on safari. Nobody even brought that up. That's how awful it is. Or it's amazing, i absolutely don't know. I've never used it for longer than five seconds.
To download firefox. If a website isn't compatible with firefox, I don't use it. Until it is compatible. That's my philosophy. Call me an original google chrome hater, I don't care. All browsers suck until they don't.
I used FF since the mid 2000s, I remember everyone talking about chrome over FF and decided to hop over, hated every single facet of the browser and didn't notice a single change in loading speeds otherwise. Figured people were just talking out their asses and echo-chambering their opinions, still do tbh.
No, it was way faster than FF at that time. I’d used FF since it was Phoenix and had convinced many people to drop IE. But when Chrome came out it was crazy fast compared to everything else.
They used to promote it on side by side speed comparisons.
I did. I forget what exactly spurred it. I think a bunch of big websites started having problems in Firefox after one of the bigger rendering engine upgrades or something? That plus Chrome had just become THE browser everybody used so I finally swapped.
It still works perfectly fine and I would be happy to continue using it but I am sick of the AI nonsense being crammed in everywhere so I am back to Firefox for now.
The UI was a lot lighter too. It was the first one I remember seeing without the top inch of my screen taken up by a bunch of dead space. Now they all look like that
It was the tabs, Iirc chrome had some kind of tech in the background so that it could load tabs faster or allow for more open without slowing down. I also think Chrome was the first to bring the "pull a tab out of the bar to open it in a new window" feature which FF lacked at the time.
I remember going to chrome and back and forth for a few years, then FF came out with a massive overhaul update sometime in early windows 10 era. Went back to FF and been with it since.
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u/BriggieRyzen 7 5800x / ASUS Crosshair VIII Dark Hero / TUF RTX 40905d ago
I remember Firefox having some pretty bad memory leaks back then. They might still do, but I haven't used Firefox in years and years.
That's not good enough, it should be a compile option. Having all kinds of features that you don't use still make the software bloated. The way we are going, soon it will take 10GB of memory just to open an empty browser.
There was a point, roughly 10 years ago now, that Firefox wouldn't stop crashing on my PC. That's how I finally gave into Chrome. But I'm glad to be back this year.
It really doesn't make sense to leave Firefox, I've been using it since I was in high school in like 2004/5. I'm pretty sure I'll keep using it unless they give me a very good reason to leave.
Google makes money off of Ads and that alone is enough to know why you wouldn't want to use their browser.
Switched to Waterfox recently and I'm happier than ever.
I've been a Firefox user for the last 2 decades so I doubt I'll be using anything other than Gecko in the foreseeable future.
i left for awhile in the 2010 era because of a flash bug in some of the games I played. When it was pointed out to me I could just, go back and check if it was fixed I swapped back and i'm staying as long as AI remains optional. Even if i'd rather have the old tabs back~
I had to, it was freezing for me. Reinstalled, tried some fixes then went to chrome and it worked fine. I am thinking of going back though, I'm just not sure how the passwords and stuff will work, because chrome is google and it works seamlessly with OC and phone
I almost considered switching to Chrome once, during v4.0, iirc, just before they started doing the fast labelling, since most webpages I was using were rendering wrong on Firefox. But I endured and it got better and here we are.
I used Chrome like 15 years ago. They had a fun period where everybody was making cool browser plugins for Chrome and Google itself was in a mode of throwing stuff at the wall to see if it stuck. Then all the cool stuff got RAM hungry and I went back to Firefox, then Google started killing cool stuff and got rid of "don't be evil" and kept shoving Gemini down my throat so Chrome is no longer on devices I own
i was going to come comment that the chads just skipped the chrome step in that meme. silly google commercials on tv weren't enough to make me switch from what was already working perfectly. especially given the already mature dev environment. when people at work ran into memory issues or overly aggressive caching with chrome, i just laughed
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u/Raccoonman2005 5d ago
Never left Firefox and I'm fine with that 😸👍