It was 10 years ago this week that a proto-Firefox crawled out of the Mozilla code swamp and first appeared on the web.
Version 0.1 of what was then known as Phoenix was released Sept. 23, 2002. Don't believe us? See for yourself: you can still grab a copy from Mozilla's server.
Mozilla has the release notes available as well, which tout Phoenix's "customizable toolbar" and "reasonable default settings." The FAQ is well worth a read, with gems like this one:
Remember when a couple MBs of disk space mattered? Simpler times, those.
Opera may deserve more credit for pushing the boundaries of what a web browser can be, but it's hard to imagine what the web would look like today without Firefox. We suspect it would be a dark, proprietary place, one best not contemplated for too long.
So happy birthday, Firefox, and thanks for all the open source fish.