Five years ago today, Mozilla released Firefox 1.0. Ars celebrates the occasion by taking a trip back in time to revisit our classic coverage of the original release.

Firefox is one of the towering achievements of the open-source movement, accounting for almost a quarter of all Web site visits just five years after its launch. One of the reasons for its enormous popularity is that it can be easily customised with a range of add-ons. But along with the really useful stuff, there's also plenty of total dross in there.

Efforts to bring advanced typography to the web have reached an important milestone. Type designers Tal Leming and Erik van Blokland, who had been working to developing the .webfont format, combined forces with Mozilla's Jonathan Kew, who had been working independently on a similar format.

Omnibar Integrates Location bar and Search bar into one. Search directly using location bar. Quickly switch engines using search engine keywords. Supports searching multiple search engines for same query using advanced operator

Microsoft has exposed Firefox users to attacks for many months; Mozilla blocks Microsoft's Firefox "leech"

Odd isn't it, how Microsoft kicked up a fuss when Google announced the Chrome plugin for Internet Explorer on the grounds that it could make the browser more insecure. Indeed, it went as far as to suggest that it doubled the potential surface area for malware and scripted attacks. Yet, amazingly, Microsoft sees no such problem with installing a plugin into the Firefox browser.

I was telling you about my issues with scrolling in Firefox (see #6). Well, I didn't manage to fix that for Firefox 3.5 but instead, I installed Firefox 3.6 beta 1 pre (Namoroka) and the scrolling now works perfectly (thanks to Tinhed for the tip!). Also, basically everything feels a lot faster, at least in Ubuntu. This is why I suggest you upgrade to Firefox 3.6.