Mozilla adopts red panda cubs to celebrate Firefox’s 7th birthday

Firefox 8 was released this week, but that’s not the only milestone creator Mozilla is celebrating. The company marked the popular web browser’s seventh birthday on November 9 by adopting three of the real-life animals behind its logo: red panda cubs.

Image credit: CubCaretaker, Twitter

Mozilla has set up a 24-hour Firefox Live stream for viewers to watch the adorable yet vulnerable cat-bears living and playing in their new home, the Knoxville Zoo. Incidentally, one cub was named after country singer Dolly Pardon. The other two adopted “Mozillians” are called Bernadette and Winston.

The company previously adopted two red panda cubs, Spark and Ember. The pair left the zoo in April to keep the species going.

Of course, Mozilla was also eager to tout the myriad technical leaps it’s made with Firefox since its 2004 launch – cute and cuddly critters or no.

Advancements to Firefox 7 increased its browsing speed and reduced its memory usage, but the latest version is 32 times faster than the progenitor, claimed Mozilla. Other elements such as third-party add-on content, an anti-tracking feature and tabs provided users with “more choice and control,” it said. On the design-side, HTML5 support was added to help developers “create beautiful and exciting web experiences.”

Not too shabby for a browser that went through two name changes before it was launched.

Mozilla plans to publish Firefox 9 before the end of the year as part of its new rapid release system. (via The Mozilla Blog)