The Next Web

Happy birthday Firefox!

Written on November 10, 2008 – 3:01 pm
Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten, Serial Internet Entrepreneur

Only 5 days ago we told you that Firefox had a 20% market share. Yesterday the Mozilla Foundation announced that Firefox turned 4! Only 4? It feels so much more, well, mature? But it is true. On November 9, 2004 Mozilla launched Firefox to the world and since then it has grown into the second-most popular browser worldwide, after Internet Explorer. It is currently available in more than 45 languages and on all major Operation Systems including Windows, Mac OS and Linux. Here is some background information (From WikiPedia) on how it all started:

Dave Hyatt and Blake Ross began working on the Firefox project as an experimental branch of the Mozilla project. They believed the commercial requirements of Netscape’s sponsorship and developer-driven feature creep compromised the utility of the Mozilla browser.^[9] To combat what they saw as the Mozilla Suite’s software bloat, they created a stand-alone browser, with which they intended to replace the Mozilla Suite. On April 3, 2003, the Mozilla Organization announced that they planned to change their focus from the Mozilla Suite to Firefox and Thunderbird.^[10]

The Firefox project has undergone several name changes. Originally titled Phoenix, it was renamed because of trademark issues with Phoenix Technologies. The replacement name, Firebird, provoked an intense response from the Firebird free database software project.^[11][12][13] In response, the Mozilla Foundation stated that the browser should always bear the name Mozilla Firebird to avoid confusion with the database software. Continuing pressure from the database server’s development community forced another change; on February 9, 2004, Mozilla Firebird became Mozilla Firefox,^[14] often referred to as simply Firefox. Mozilla prefers Firefox to be abbreviated as Fx or fx, though it is often abbreviated as FF.^[15]

The Firefox project went through many versions before 1.0 was released on November 9, 2004. After a series of stability and security fixes, the Mozilla Foundation released its first major update, Firefox version 1.5, on November 29, 2005. On October 24, 2006, Mozilla released Firefox 2. This version includes updates to the tabbed browsing environment, the extensions manager, the GUI, and the find, search and software update engines; a new session restore feature; inline spell checking; and an anti-phishing feature which was implemented by Google as an extension,^[16][17] and later merged into the program itself.^[18] In December 2007, Firefox Live Chat was launched. It allows users to ask volunteers questions through a system powered by Jive Software, with guaranteed hours of operation and the possibility of help after hours.^[19]

If you haven’t tried Firefox yet you might want to start today. Happy birthday Firefox!!

I hope you like that post!

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birthday, firefox, mozilla

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Skype turns 5 years old, what will future hold?

Written on August 29, 2008 – 6:02 pm
Robin Wauters, Next web enthusiast & Plugg organizer

Celebrating ‘five years of wow‘, the Skype team has put up a blog post to look 5 years back in time, when Skype was made publicly available (in beta).

In the post, CEO Josh Silverman mentions that Skype is nearing 350 million users, and boasts about ‘6 quarters of profitability’ and ‘over $500M annual revenue run-rate’.

Skype is certainly doing ok, and it is still one of the first companies bring up when they talk about European entrepreneurship and its successes. EBay acquired Skype in September 2005 for approximately $2.6 billion in up-front cash and eBay stock, plus potential performance-based consideration.

But what will the future bring for the free communication utility?

Ebay seems less happy with the acquisition than a few years ago. In October 2007, it took a $900 million so-called impairment write-down against the value of Skype, and it became apparent then that Skype’s revenue streams failed to live up to expectations. Skype co-founder Niklas Zennstrom even stepped down as CEO.

Its model for actually making money has been called flawed repeatedly. 2008 would become a year of “testing synergies” between the online voice and video communications service and other eBay operations such as auctions and PayPal. eBay CEO John Donahoe told the Financial Times in April of this year that “if the synergies are strong, we’ll keep Skype in our portfolio. If not, we’ll reassess it,” and possibly sell the unit. Rumors of a Google / Skype merger went swirling.

But it hasn’t come to that yet, and at this point it’s pretty hard to predict where Skype will be in say, a year.

Anyway, happy birthday, Skype!

birthday, ebay, Niklas Zennstrom, skype

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