Mozilla

7 years of Mozilla product releases

June 4th, 2009

We started building Mozilla browsers 11 years ago now. Our first “product” release was Mozilla 1.0, on June 5, 2002. Wired reminded me of this today, in a nice historical piece on the 7th anniversary. I find it extremely gratifying that Wired, as well as others, remembers that first release and choose to note its anniversary. It wasn’t Firefox, but we were proud of Mozilla 1.0, and I still think rightly so.

The anniversary has my mind spinning about a project that’s been kicking around in various forms. I would like to create a sort of timeline of Mozilla that is personal. Somewhat related to the existing timeline project, but focused on Mozilla contributors rather than events. I’d like to have some way to visualize when people came to Mozilla, what brought each of us. I have a story to tell, and I’m sure most active contributors do. I’d like to collect these somehow, with a way to visualize it. In other words, not just text or stories or books or posts, but something that makes use of the stunning ability we have today to visualize and interact with data.

Any ideas welcome.

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9 comments for “7 years of Mozilla product releases”

  1. 1

    Tristan said on June 5th, 2009 at 1:31 am:

    Wow, I’d love to see this happen too!

  2. 2

    Neil Rashbrook said on June 5th, 2009 at 2:06 am:

    Nice quilt!

  3. 3

    Tomer said on June 5th, 2009 at 5:16 am:

    I remember watching a documented film about the early days of Mozilla. The film was broadcasted across the world (Even here in Israel with Hebrew subtitles!), at the time no one was familiar with Mozilla and Netscape was known only to some people who didn’t knew yet the connection between Netscape and Mozilla.

    This film is very old and I don’t think it will be broadcast ever again. Do you think it is possible to get it online for anyone who is interested in the history of Mozilla to watch for free? Sounds to me like a good way to promote the usage of Firefox3.5 video object.

  4. 4

    Mitchell Baker said on June 5th, 2009 at 7:03 am:

    Tomer: i’m not sure what film it could be unless it’s Code Rush. It had some pictures of Pav arriving. It also had a lot of footage of a guy named Jim who wasn’t important to the project at all — it was his friend that made the film I think. does that sound like the one you’re thinking of?

  5. 5

    Tomer said on June 5th, 2009 at 7:19 am:

    I guess that if only one film produced, it must be this one. Thanks to wikipedia, I was able to find an online version of the film (in a low quality resolution, I must admit).

    http://www.viddler.com/explore/coderush/videos/1/

  6. 6

    Robert Kaiser said on June 5th, 2009 at 7:55 am:

    Cool idea!

    And congrats to everyone in our community who were celebrating Mozilla 1.0 back then and still see what we have made out of it 7 years later! It was great back then, it’s still great today!

  7. 7

    Ken Saunders said on June 5th, 2009 at 11:13 am:

    Congrats to all!

    I find it to be very cool that I can jump back in time and experience some of those first releases such as I did about a month ago when I installed mozilla 1.0, phoenix-0.1 and a few others (that worked just fine by the way).

    Your project idea sounds fantastic and something that I’d be very interested in seeing. I’ve always found the schematics and history of things much more interesting than the final and current results.

    Personal and individual video documentaries would be awesome. PBS type ones. Each contributor could write their own biography, assemble their own historical materials (documents, screen shots, news and media articles, etc) and have a friend narrate it all and do a short interview with the contributor.

    This way of doing things would put it on each contributor (and the friend of course) rather than searching for someone to volunteer to do it and hope that they would do it accurately and of good quality.

    It could all be presented using an interactive Mozilla Tree type (or other) diagram with lots and lots of Care Bears and purple glitter!

    Oh wait, this isn’t for MySpace is it?

  8. 8

    David Boswell said on June 5th, 2009 at 12:33 pm:

    I think this is a great idea for a project. There’s a page on the wiki for anyone to add thoughts, suggestions or examples of timelines on other sites.

    https://wiki.mozilla.org/Mozilla.org:History:Timeline_page

  9. 9

    Health and safety said on June 15th, 2009 at 6:51 am:

    do you guys know any thing in history that really fits into the ‘conflict and compromise’ topic? it needs to be an even in history that started out as a conflict but ended in a compromise. please help. thank you

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