No One Knows How Far Firefox Can Go. Let's Remember the Product That Once Broke the Darkness

It has lost its biggest customer and missed mobile, so Firefox has few chances left. That does not erase what it gave us.

"We now have no commercial relationship with Google at all," said Mozilla's chief business and legal officer, Dixon Thaye. That means the company behind the Firefox browser has lost the money that kept it going for a decade: the fee Google paid to be its default search engine.

Mozilla says it can still survive. Even as it lost Google's US$300 million a year, Yahoo and Baidu stepped into Google's place. And last month Firefox came to the iPhone.

But Mozilla's position looks anything but promising. Firefox for iPhone arrived too late. The iPhone is already in its eighth year, and Firefox's share of the mobile browser market is under 0.5%, so small that research firms long ago lumped it into "other."

The desktop market, where Firefox once shone, now belongs to Google's Chrome. Windows 10, launched this summer, switched users' default browser to Edge, which Microsoft built from scratch.

And Firefox OS, the mobile operating system announced in 2012, has long gone quiet.

On laptops and smartphones alike, Firefox no longer has any part in how people get online. Mozilla would need a few miracles to save the project.

None of that stops us from paying tribute to a company that changed the browser, and with it the course of the internet. Whether you use Chrome, IE or one of the browsers Chinese internet companies have reworked, every one of them carries features that Firefox made popular.

In the dark years when Microsoft ruled everything, it was Firefox that first lit the fire that would eventually burn Internet Explorer down.

The Internet Before Firefox

In 1994 a company called Netscape was founded in Silicon Valley. The internet was just getting started, and the browser of the same name that Netscape created soon became people's way onto the web. It was also paid software.

Only a year later Microsoft's Internet Explorer (IE) was born. What we now call the first browser war began there.

Within two years IE had caught up with Netscape. Microsoft then bundled it with the hugely successful Windows 95, and IE won.

AOL bought Netscape in 1998, and Netscape faded. IE entered its era of dominance, at its peak holding as much as 95% of the market.

With full control over the gateway to the internet, Microsoft stopped moving. IE 6, released in 2001, kept its version number for five years; version 7.0 did not arrive until 2006. Even that was not the end of IE 6. Only in 2010 did Microsoft start a countdown for the aging browser and announce its retirement.

Over those five-plus years, IE became a byword for monopoly and poor usability. Forbes once wrote: "IE6 is a negative example for the history of product engineering."

In the same five years, Steve Jobs used the iPod to make a nearly bankrupt company hot again and laid the ground for the iPhone. Google went from a small startup with no visible revenue to a public company, the biggest tech company of its day. Amazon, a retail site once struggling to survive, created AWS, the forerunner of cloud computing services, and secretly built the Kindle, which changed reading.

How Firefox Came to Be

Netscape did not leave the stage entirely. Before its sale was announced in 1998, it had already planted the seeds of the second browser war. That January, the desperate company announced that all future versions would be free and that it would open-source its code.

It also set up a nonprofit, Mozilla Org, the predecessor of the Mozilla Foundation that would later create Firefox.

By 2003 Netscape had been dissolved amid the lawsuit between Microsoft and AOL. The newly renamed Mozilla Foundation became the only body responsible for keeping Netscape's open-source project alive, and that was when work on the Firefox browser began.

What Firefox Brought

In 2004, after Firefox's first preview release, downloads passed one million in just six days. Four years later, version 3.0 was downloaded more than 8 million times on its release day, a Guinness World Record. By then IE's share had fallen to 63%, and Firefox's had reached 30%.

Firefox succeeded so quickly because it offered a normal browsing experience. IE 6, frozen for years, was plagued by viruses and security holes, and it loaded pages slowly. It did not support semi-transparent PNG images or the latest web standards either, so broken page layouts were common.

It is no exaggeration to say that Firefox, opening the same website, showed a completely different world, and a more beautiful one.

Firefox also introduced many innovations that the mainstream browsers from Google, Apple and Microsoft went on to borrow.

Extensions

Mouse gestures, automatic page turning and point-to-translate dictionaries are just a few of the things Firefox's tens of thousands of extensions could do. Today almost every browser lets third-party developers publish extensions.

Private mode

Firefox added this mode, which leaves no browsing history or cookies behind, as early as 2008. Chrome did not offer it until 2010.

Ad blocking

In iOS 9, Safari recently added content blocking, which it says can block ads in the browser. The Adblock Plus extension already did this on Firefox in 2004.

Syncing bookmarks and history across computers

Every browser now advertises cloud sync. Firefox had it in 2007.

Changes in browser market share, 2007-2015

So Firefox won over not only tech enthusiasts but anyone who cared about their online experience. By 2010 it held 34% of the browser market, its best moment in years.

Firefox Misses the Mobile Internet

While Firefox was still fighting for a bigger share on desktop computers, the mobile internet had already arrived with the smartphone.

When Steve Jobs unveiled the iPhone in 2007, Safari was one of the three key features he demonstrated on stage. Before the App Store existed, easier web browsing was the reason people bought an iPhone.

But Firefox did not see how much mobile could matter. As late as 2013, its vice president of products, Jay Sullivan, said Firefox would never release an iOS version unless Apple lifted its restrictions on third-party browser rendering engines. While Firefox still brushed off the iPhone, its main desktop rival, Google Chrome, had accepted Apple's restrictions and launched on iOS in 2012. It still ranks near the top of the download charts.

On Android, the platform with the larger user base, Firefox was slow too. It insisted on bringing as many features as possible to Android, and although work started early, it did not officially launch there until 2011. In 2012 Chrome arrived on Android and fixed the problem of the weak built-in browser. A year later Google made Chrome Android's default browser. Firefox had missed its chance to gain a foothold on Android.

Firefox's earliest and most committed mobile effort was a partnership, begun in 2008, with Maemo, Nokia's touch-screen operating system. Maemo was meant to be Nokia's operating system of the future, but when Nokia switched to Windows Phone in 2011, Maemo was abandoned. Along with Nokia's future, it took down all of Firefox's chances in the mobile market.

Made by Google, Undone by Google

The Mozilla Foundation is a nonprofit, and a share of search-engine ad revenue is a major source of its income.

Bing, Yandex, Yahoo, Baidu and Amazon have all been partners. But its most important ally was Google, which supplied more than 85% of its revenue.

In 2004 Google signed a deal with Mozilla to build the Google search box into Firefox. From then on, Mozilla received a sizeable share of ad revenue from Google every year. In the three years after the deal was renewed at the end of 2011, Mozilla took in nearly US$300 million a year from Google. For Google, owning such a gateway to users secured a steady stream of ad revenue. The arrangement suited both sides, and it gave Firefox a reliable source of money as it grew.

Mozilla's revenue, 2005-2014

Four years in, the relationship hit trouble. Google released Chrome in 2008. Easy to use and better integrated with Google's services, Google's own browser grew fast over the next few years. Firefox now faced a powerful new competitor, and a rift between the two partners began to open.

Chrome is built for rapid iteration; in seven years its version number has reached 47. It also offers an extension store much like Firefox's, and installing extensions does not require a restart. Even web developers now debug their pages in Chrome, which used to be one of Firefox's selling points.

In 2011 Chrome fully caught up with Firefox's market share. A declining Firefox could well have been dropped by Google in the end. So it was no surprise when Mozilla announced in 2014 that it would not renew with Google and would make Yahoo its default search engine in the United States.

The irony is that Yahoo may not be able to reverse its own decline. In October it signed a three-year agreement with Google under which Google supplies Yahoo's search ads on desktop and mobile. Before long, Yahoo search results will in fact be Google's results.

That leaves Firefox with a cut of whatever Yahoo gets from Google. Its supposed independence from Google looks less real than it sounds.

The Failure of Firefox OS

Mozilla's last ambitious push was a mobile operating system, Firefox OS.

Mozilla formally announced Firefox OS in 2012. Because carriers and handset makers wanted to escape Google's control, by July 2013 it had the backing of four handset makers, including LG, Alcatel, Huawei and ZTE, and in October phones went on sale in South America and Europe.

With carrier support, the US$33 phone sold reasonably well at first at the low end of the market. In its first year it took 12% of smartphone sales in Venezuela and 8% in Colombia.

But carrier promotion could only give it one chance. Short of apps, missing features and slow to respond, Firefox OS failed to keep its users.

Today Firefox OS has under 1% of the market, and its focus has shifted to low-end phones in Africa, the next market likely to be swallowed by Android, as Southeast Asia and South America were.

Microsoft has burned through more than US$10 billion since 2010 and made no headway in mobile. Setting out to build a third mobile operating system this late, Mozilla stands little chance.

Still, it is easy to see why Firefox wanted an operating system. Its rivals are no longer browsers but operating systems. Behind Safari stand iOS and the Mac; Chrome has Android; IE (and now Edge) has Windows. The situation looks much like it did 17 years ago.

Each of these companies has its own account system that works across platforms and can tie directly into the web views inside apps. A third-party browser cannot do that at all.

Facing Apple and Google, Firefox chose to fight on operating systems. With Firefox OS failing, Firefox the browser has few chances left, and its market share is unlikely to recover in the foreseeable future.

For the second time, a nonprofit took on the world's most valuable tech companies. This time it lost.

Cover image from: Cnet

Header image from: Firefox Community