From left to right, Mozilla’s director of mobile Stuart Parmenter, director of Firefox development Mike Beltzner, manager of Firefox’s frontend features team Johnathan Nightingale and team lead of graphics Vladimir Vukićević. The foursome sits below a quilt made by Mozilla Foundation chairwoman Mitchell Baker. Photo: Michael Calore.

MOUNTAIN VIEW, California — Vladimir Vukićević was working at the Mozilla office when Firefox was first released into the wild.

“All of our servers melted instantly,” Vukićević says. “We spent an hour trying to get the downloads back up.”

Indeed, the anticipation around the release of Firefox 1.0 on November 9, 2004 — five years ago Monday — was electric.

Mozilla had already produced its own eponymous browser based on open source code in 2002, but it was largely considered a failure. Firefox was the organization’s great re-do, and its second attempt to unseat its biggest nemesis, Microsoft Internet Explorer.

A half-decade later, Firefox is no longer a scrappy upstart but a dominant player. Old rival IE still commands around 60 percent