Five years ago today, Mozilla announced the official release of Firefox 1.0. The open source Web browser has come a very long way since then and has achieved a level of popularity that few would have imagined possible. The success of Firefox and Mozilla's unwavering commitment to open Web standards has helped to usher in a new era of vibrance and diversity in the browser market. To commemorate Firefox's fifth anniversary, we are going to take you back in time for a look at some of our classic coverage of the popular browser.

Firefox emerged as an effort to replace the Mozilla Suite's browser with a lighter alternative based on the same underlying technology. The developers originally called their creation Phoenix, an allusion to their mission of bringing about a Mozilla rebirth. The earliest Phoenix binaries were released to the public in 2002 and began to attract serious attention over the course of the following year.

The first Phoenix coverage on Ars Technica appears in Diary of a Geek from April 2003. Although author Ben Rota had previously been skeptical about tabbed browsing based on his experiences with Opera, his first test of Phoenix convinced him that the feature could be valuable. He also cites popup blocking and autocompletion based on frequency of use as other favorite features of Phoenix.

"When I heard people saying good things about Phoenix, I decided to give it a shot. And, indeed, I was impressed. I also found a use for tabbed browsing. It's a good way to combine all of the pages on a particular topic," he wrote. "Maybe someday I'll be able to switch to [Phoenix] permanently. I'll be watching the new releases of Phoenix carefully."

It's strange to think back to that time when the mainstream browser features that we take for granted today were first being introduced. Do you remember your first exposure to tabbed browsing and intelligent autocompletion? Many of the things that made Phoenix great in its early days have been reimagined in recent releases and continue to be an important part of the browsing experience. For example, the autocompletion feature that impressed Ben Rota in 2003 has become the aptly-named AwesomeBar in Firefox 3.

Due to trademark conflicts, Phoenix became Firebird and then Firefox. Shortly before the official launch of Firefox 1.0 in 2004, Linux.Ars columnist Jorge Castro sat down with Mozilla's Scott Collins to capture some of his thoughts about the approaching 1.0 release. Collins talked about Mozilla's transition to Firefox and shared his hopes for the browser's future.

"I've never been good at predicting the future, I'm happy to be where we are now, but I think we have a long way to go and I have hope that we'll get there. I have hope that we will be a mainstream browser and that people will use Mozilla," he told Ars. "That's the thing I learned to lust after as a programmer. It's not my ability to solve one problem, to plow this field, but the ability to build a plow that every farmer uses. The ability to make something that touches not ten people, not a hundred people, not a thousand people but a hundred million people. I want Mozilla to be there again. IE is a browser with no soul. I want it to be Mozilla because I think that people who care deserve a browser with a soul."

The plow analogy reflects the soulful reverence for user empowerment that has shaped Mozilla's mission. As Collins hoped, that philosophy helped to propel the open source browser into the mainstream. Firefox now has over 300 million daily users and has been downloaded over 1 billion times, a critical milestone that was reached earlier this year.

We covered the official Firefox 1.0 launch on November 9, 2004. "Today's the day: open source browser Firefox finally sees its 1.0 release. Getting there took 19 months, two name changes, and several hundred nightly builds, but the wait has been worth it," wrote Ars managing editor Eric Bangeman. "The future looks bright for Firefox as well as the rest of the applications in the Mozilla family."

Indeed, Firefox has become a bright symbol of technological freedom and the poster child of open source success. Mozilla's efforts have helped to raise awareness about the importance of vendor-neutral Web standards and the power of collaboration and community-driven development. Mozilla's philosophical values became the cement with which the architects of the open Web built our brave new Internet.

With HTML 5 and a new generation of compelling Web standards beginning to emerge, the Internet is poised on the brink of another rebirth. This time, Mozilla does not stand alone with its vision of open source browsing for an open Web. The venerable organization is joined by industry leaders like Apple and Google who also offer innovative open source browser implementations.

The next five years will hopefully bring about changes that are even more substantive and profound than we would dare imagine. We hope freedom will be the future of the Web and that Mozilla will continue leading the way.