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 po pular 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.