Mozilla Firefox is the 2nd most used web browser in the world, following Microsoft’s Internet Explorer. With its extensive history with Netscape (which Nina will cover), Firefox was created after Netscape released its source code in 1994 and is now a free and open source web browser itself. Netscape’s dominance quickly faded because of its competition with Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, ultimately leading to the antitrust trial United States v Microsoft. On May 1998, the United States Department of Justice and 20 US states filed against the Microsoft Corporation for Microsoft’s monopoly on personal computers and their bundles with operating systems and web browsers. United States v Microsoft centrally sought to eliminate Internet Explorer as the pre-installed web browser in PCs which compromised the business of Netscape and other internet browsers because this automatically gave PC owners Internet Explorer to use. In reaching a settlement, Microsoft was to “share its application programming interfaces with third-party companies.”
In 1998 Netscape boldly decided to release its browser suite source code for free over the internet, founded the Mozilla project, and “intended to harness the creative power of thousands of programmers on the Internet and fuel unprecedented levels of innovation in the browser market.” The free source code not only inspired the next web browser, but other development tools and projects. Mozilla Firefox, as a open source software, connected and continues to connect an online global community that works together with the belief that the internet should benefit the public. Now, Firefox is triple licensed under the Mozilla Public License (MPL), GNU General Public License (GPL), and the Lesser General Public License (LGPL). Firefox’s logo are under trademark and copyright licenses which creates a restraint on how their source codes are to be distributed, which conflicted with the Debian Project.
It is now 5 years since Firefox’s initial release and is still popular and maintained by online communities. With thousands of add-ons, Firefox is easy to customize–maybe too easy. Instances such as the Pirates-of-the-Amazon where an add-on allows users to find free downloads of music by going to Amazon and installing ad-blocking software affects the internet business show that the future of the internet has endless possibilities.
