"Since plenty of other people will be picking over that action-packed half-decade, I though I'd do something different: a look at the history leading up to that launch.
"Firefox's roots go back even further than the Mozilla project, to the browser Mosaic. This was released in 1993, and was written by a bunch of academics led by a certain Mark Andreessen at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. It was notable in several important respects.
"irst, it was free – not just as in beer, which might have been expected for a research project, but also as in freedom. Actually, this wasn't full free software, since the source code was only available for “research and education purposes on a request basis”, but it was a start."
