It was released on November 9, 2004, and challenged Internet Explorer's dominance with 60 million downloads within nine months. It is the spiritual successor of Netscape Navigator, as the Mozilla community was created by Netscape in 1998, before its acquisition by AOL. Įirefox usage share grew to a peak of 32.21% in November 2009, with Firefox 3.5 overtaking Internet Explorer 7, although not all versions of Internet Explorer as a whole its usage then declined in competition with Google Chrome. As of December 2022, according to StatCounter, it had a 7.1% usage share as a desktop web browser, making it the fourth-most popular desktop web browser after Google Chrome (66.1%), Microsoft Edge (11.2%), and Safari (9.6%).
Across all platforms, it again places fourth with a usage share of 3.04%. The Firefox project has undergone several name changes.
