Happy 5th Bday, Mozilla Firefox!

Did you know its been five years since the excellent Mozilla Firefox browser launched and drove trigger happy browsers insane!

To celebrate the landmark event, Mozilla is launching a campaign called “Light the World with Firefox”, and it will include shining the Firefox logo in cities such as Paris, Tokyo, Rome and San Francisco. Now if only they could do such a thing in India! Are you one of the 330 million Firefox users? Well you should be!

Anyways Firefox has turned out to be the world's fastest growing browsers, thanks to the undeniable effort put in by its developers and the thousands of the browser's awesome plugins (or add-ons as they're called). Firefox's philosophy is simple - to offer stronger user security, enhanced content collaboration, genuine simplicity and intelligent web innovation. You can head over to the Mozilla webpage to check out the “Five Years of Firefox” segment, which is a video that has been translated in 27 different languages.

According to Tristan Nitot, president of Mozilla Europe, “younger users of the internet take for granted that the freedom they enjoy is forever. I don't think it is like that. The internet is full of promise but the future is not bright unless we make sure it is. A battle over who 'owns' the internet and whether it should be regulated is under way and the outcome could be hugely significant.”

As we reported a few days ago , Firefox has finally surpassed IE6, which is easily the most hated version of Microsoft’s browser.

Christopher Blizzard over at hacks.mozilla.org wrote in his blog post: 'Over the next five years everyone can expect that the browser should take part in a few new areas – to act as the user agent it should be. Issues around data, privacy and identity loom large. You will see the values of Mozilla’s public benefit mission reflected in our product choices in these areas to make users safer and help them understand what it means to share data with web sites.

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. Expect to see changes in the expectations around the licensing of codecs.

And over the next five years mobile will play an increasingly important role in our lives, and 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.'