The Open Source community is celebrating the fifth year anniversary of the popular Firefox Internet browser. According to Mozilla, over 330 million users have downloaded Firefox since the initial release of version 1.0.
“Over the last five years we’ve been setting ourselves up for the next five. The web is moving faster, not slower, and modern browsers are set to handle it,” said Mozilla’s Chris Blizzard. “In this sense we’ve done our jobs. We were first on the scene with fast JavaScript, CORS, mixing HTML and SVG, WebGL is based on Canvas3D work we pioneered, we’re scripting hardware with geolocation and orientation.”
Blizzard noted that Mozilla was helping to standardize new CSS capabilities, modern font systems and security tools for next-generation browsers.
“The browsers that are on the horizon aren’t just incremental changes – they represent the pieces to build the next generation web – rich with standards-based graphics, new JavaScript libraries and full blown applications,” explained Blizzard. “[For example], expect to see big changes in the video space. HTML5-based video and open video codecs are starting to appear on the web as web developers make individual choices to support a standards-based, royalty-free approach. [And] expect to see changes in the expectations around the licensing of codecs.”
Blizzard also predicted that the mobile sector will play an “increasingly important” role in the future of the web.
“The decisions of users, carriers, governments and the people who build phones will have far-reaching effects on this new extension to the Internet and how people will access information for decades to come,” he added.
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