Wired’s This Day In Tech remembers the release of Mozilla 1.0 seven years ago today.  Here’s an excerpt:

Months after launch, the browser had only captured a minuscule percentage of the market. The goal was to beat Microsoft with open source. Netscape couldn’t do it. And, according to [Asa] Dotzler, “we realized Mozilla couldn’t do it, either.”

While Mozilla 1.0 wasn’t a success, what followed certainly was. Two Mozilla contributors, Ben Goodger and Blake Ross, proposed taking things back to basics. The Mozilla source code was stripped down and rewritten once again, and all of the extraneous features were canned.

In late 2004, a faster, slimmer and easier-to-use browser emerged: Mozilla Firefox.

Hat-tip to @firefox and @mitchellbaker on Twitter.

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