Six years ago today, (9 November 2004), Firefox 1.0 hit the servers.

Development of the browser was officially announced in April 2003 and originally called Phoenix -- raising the ire of the trademark holders. Renaming it Firebird raised the ire of the free database software developers, so it was finally branded Firefox nine months before it's inital release.

At the time, Microsoft's Internet Explorer 6 was the dominant player in the browser market. A security nightmare and notoriously non-compliant with W3C standards, it nevertheless had a 98%+ market share and was considered unasailable.
What difference could a non-bundled browser that users had to manually download and install for themselves make?

Quite a lot, actually.

As Firefox started nibbling at their numbers, Microsoft's browser developers were dragged out of the semi-retirement they'd been in since the release of IE6 in 2001, and eventually churned out IE7 in late 2006 -- copying many of Firefox's features. Six days later, Firefox 2.0 hit the servers, and the battle's continued ever since.

Firefox 3.0 was released in June 2008 and set a Guiness World Record for over 8 million unique downloads in a single day. And it's numbers keep on climbing. According to NetMarketShare (October 2010), Firefox now has 23% of the browser market with IE down to 59%. That will certainly fall further with all the fun features coming in Firefox 4.0. It's currently in beta (get a copy here) and due for release early next year

So raise your glasses this evening (as if you needed an excuse!) and toast Firefox, the little browser that could.