Firefox, free open-source Web browser created by the American software company Mozilla Corporation.
In 1998 the American Internet services company Netscape Communications Corp. decided to designate its Navigator browser as open-source for users, who began the development of Mozilla Firefox. The Mozilla team, led by the American developers Dave Hyatt and Blake Ross, sought to create a light fast-loading browser that would appeal to users in its efficiency. In 2002 they released their first browser, Phoenix, which soon included features such as bookmarking (for saving website addresses) and the ability to add extensions to modify or customize the browser.
Because of trademark disputes with the American software company Phoenix Technologies, Phoenix became Firebird. Then in 2004 Firebird was renamed Firefox to avoid confusion with an open-source development project of the same name. The first Firefox (version 0.8) included an installer for Microsoft Corporation’s Windows OS (operating system) and had Google as its sole default search engine (users had to add others manually). Soon after the release of Firefox 1.0 in November 2004, the browser began to take a significant portion of the market share from Microsoft’s Internet Explorer. Mozilla later expanded Firefox’s market worldwide by adding support for 31 languages. Within weeks of the release of Firefox 1.0, Mozilla also introduced Thunderbird, an open-source e-mail client that was developed to work in tandem with Firefox as a Web application.
Frequent upgrades to Firefox’s security features provide protection against viruses and other malicious software. In October 2006 Firefox 2.0 added protection from phishing (e-mail messages that seek to exploit the recipient) and the ability to restore tabs (hidden browser windows) from a user’s last session. In June 2008 Firefox 3.0 included a new Web page-rendering engine to improve performance. In June 2009 Firefox 3.5 included a new, faster JavaScript engine and support for HTML 5.0 (hypertext markup language, used for formatting Web pages).
Cumulative downloads for the Firefox browser exceeded one billion on July 31, 2009, making it easily the most widely used open-source software in the world. In 2010 Firefox surpassed Internet Explorer to become the most popular Web browser in Europe—the first time Internet Explorer was not the most-used browser in a major market area. Firefox’s dominance was attributed to the stealing of users from Internet Explorer by Google’s Web browser, Chrome, while Firefox’s share remained steady at more than one-third of the market. Chrome soon surpassed Firefox in popularity in Europe and worldwide. As of 2021, Firefox was the fourth most popular browser worldwide, with 3.9 percent of the market, after Chrome (64 percent), Apple’s Safari (19 percent), and Microsoft’s Edge (4.2 percent).