On Friday November 9 2004, eight years ago the Mozilla foundation launched the first version of Firefox. Mozilla’s open source browser was seen as a breath of fresh air at the time when Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 6 dominated the market share, annoying many users with its numerous security issues.
Over the years, Firefox captured a sizable chunk of the market share from Internet Explorer, but in the last couple of years it has gotten some very serious competition in the form of Google’s Chrome. Currently, Firefox is the world’s third most popular browser, behind IE and Chrome.
Mozilla renewed the partnership with Google in November that ensures Google remains the default search tool. Google contributed to 84 percent of Mozilla’s $123 million revenue in 2010.