Mozilla's Firefox has been my favourite web browser since the first version of the free software download appeared in November 2004. Its arrival triggered a rerun of the 1990s “browser wars” that pitted Microsoft's then upstart Internet Explorer against the incumbent Netscape Navigator.
Since then, Firefox – developed by the open-source Mozilla nonprofit foundation – has won about 23 per cent of the browser market. Firefox has achieved this even though it lacks the financial muscle enjoyed by rivals such as Microsoft and Apple, which deliver their browsers along with their respective Windows and Mac operating systems, or the momentum of Google, a former Mozilla supporter that launched its own browser, Google Chrome, last year.
Firefox has long been prized by users for its advanced features and speed, and the flexibility and customisation facilitated by the thousands of third-party browser add-ons that have been developed for it. But recently some users have begun to fret that it might be losing its edge as rivals introduced new versions of their own browsers that were often faster and sleeker and boasted new features that Firefox 3 lacked.