I was a senior in high school, and I was clandestinely installing Firefox 1.0 onto the school’s computers to bypass their poorly implemented firewall.

Started using Firefox back when it was still Phoenix. Prior to that, my daily driver web browser was Mozilla/Seamonkey. I switched to Chrome for a few years, but I always keep coming back to Firefox.

I was toying with Linux. Mozilla was slow and overloaded with unnecessary stuff. Then I heard about a light version of their browser I think called Firebird, that name was taken though, so they had to change the name to Phoenix, turns out that too was taken, and then they had to change it again and settled on Firefox. It was in version 0.62 or something.

I guess I started using Firefox when it was called NCSA Mosaic. A friend showed it to me at Apple in 1993, but I didn’t get what the web was good for then. (To be sure, there wasn’t much there yet.) By 1994 I was working at SGI, and marketing was exploring whether there was a product there for us, so I installed it, started using it, followed NCSA’s daily roundup of new web sites for a while. It was mind boggling – hundreds of sites, and three or four new ones every day! (Yes, those are global totals.)

By late 1994, Mosaic Communications (later renamed to Netscape, then Mozilla) was poaching employees from SGI, including quite a few people I knew.

By 1995, my girlfriend (now wife) was shocked to see a URL on the side of a bus. That was our proof that the web had gone mainstream.

Internet Explorer and Chrome didn’t exist yet, of course.

Firefox has just always been the sensible choice for me personally. Having it be open and run by Mozilla (who for all their faults I think are good folks), having an honest focus on user privacy,and the only non-chromium browser, and therefore the only one that won’t ransom my RAM, makes the choice just logical. On top of that, on mobile, Firefox can bring over my beloved plug-ins (the wealth of plug-ins is a plus too) for a great browsing experience like with UBlock Origin, and Firefox Focus is a godsend: doing stupid searches or quick tasks that disappear and don’t clog my tabs in the real browser!

I started to have access to a computer on a regular basis around late 1998/early 1999 at school. I remember a teacher installed Netscape on all the computers. I was intrigued, tried it and basically sticked with it until Netscape 8. Quickly after the release of Netscape 8, I learned about a new project based on it and called Firefox (1.0). The project mission really resonated with me and I decided to switch to Firefox as my default browser.

By discovering Firefox, I became more curious about the Web, development and open source in general. Fast forward to now, I’m still using Firefox (and other product from Mozilla) and I’m actively contributing to it :).

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• When I started, Netscape was wonderful. I loved the toolbars with the ‘drag’ bars which you could click to collapse… so much better than IE.

• When I moved to Thailand, internet shops started up - using Windows 98 for a while there.

Opera browser and Firefox were really good viable options. Opera had super smooth mouse gestures and was better for a while - but in the long run Firefox was more reliable.

Chrome took over for a number of years, but Firefox later became my ‘default’ (though still not most-used) browser.

About 5 years ago when I moved over to Manjaro KDE, I liked their theming for Firefox (I dropped it now, but still…) and just found very very few reasons to fire up another browser.

KDE with X11 desktop has mouse gestures built in, so it no longer matters in that regard if I use Firefox, or anything else (even text editors) because many shortcuts are now almost consistent across all softwares… I can close, reopen and navigate tabs in Dolphin file browser the same as with Firefox.

I started with Netscape then went through Mozilla then Phoenix/Firebird/Firefox on the desktop. I had a brief fling with Opera back in the day when it had its own engine and was trying to do cool things. I also used WaterFox for a while after the great extension debacle, but always came back to Firefox.

On mobile I started with Opera because it used to be a great browser and pretty much the best browser on featurephones back in the 90s. I also used it on smartphones for quite a while because I had all my stuff synced in my Opera account, and also Firefox took its sweet time becoming fast and light on mobile.

Nowadays it’s mostly Firefox, plus Hermit for sandboxing sites like Facebook or Google into their own “app”. Wish Firefox offered that feature instead but oh well.

I started using Firefox for its adblock addon on W98 with v1.0.3? but my computer at the time couldn’t handle it (433mhz,96MB RAM) so I used Maxthon.
When I got a new computer with 256MB RAM (later 768) I switched over to Firefox 1.5.0.14? near full time because of the amount of customization.
I was saddened by v53+'s lockdown & eventual removal of XUL API’s for customization & am still waiting to recover functionality to this day with v115.

On mobile I used Opera in ~2007/2008 on a feature phone.
My first android phone in 2011 (Transform, a low end 2.1 Eclaire slider with 256MB RAM) in 2012 didn’t cut it CPU arch & RAM wise so I used Opera & Dolphin because of RAM.
It took until I got a SGS4 (2GB RAM) to switch over to Firefox & I haven’t looked back.

Fuck, I’m old. The first time I started using Firefox was when it emerged from the ashes of Netscape Navigator. It was called Phoenix back then… This must have been the early 2000s. Then I moved to Chrome when that became popular. Finally in the last 4 months I’ve adopted Firefox again because of the ad-blocker-limiting decisions that Google has made re: Chrome.

I used Firefox on and off since new then started permanently with Firefox around 2008 for a few years before jumping to chrome which was rendering way faster at the time. Never really gone back permanently due to crashing issues across several machines. Better these days and now use as a separate browser / profile for working on client projects I can clear all settings at end of job

Man… I don’t remember specifically when I started using Firefox, but it was up until Chrome first was released and then I was stuck in the Chromium and its offshoots ever since.

I recently came back only as of…last year and made it a point to get away from a lot of Google junk, as well as negative social media experiences!