The story of Firefox reads like a mythological epic. Believe it or not, Firefox is simply the most recent chapter in a story which began before the world wide web existed in anything remotely resembling its present form.

The engine that runs Firefox, something called a "rendering engine" which is common to all browsers, can trace its ancestry all the way back to the original versions of the Netscape Navigator browser, the product which really first brought the Internet into widespread public use.

As most people who have watched the development of the Internet for any length of time know, Netscape Navigator was "open-sourced" a number of years ago. The organization which was formed to develop the source code into an "open source browser" was the Mozilla Foundation, named for the green lizard character adopted as its mascot. The original Mozilla browser very quickly became a viable alternative browser on just about every popular computing platform, and development began to accelerate.

Like many new open source projects, however, Mozilla grew in a number of directions which began to distract the project from its original goal: to make a really good browser. Fortunately, by the time this became an issue, Mozilla already had some of the best features of any commercial browser, including most notably, tabbed browsing and extraordinarily good support for standards like Cascading Style Sheets (CSS).

What had started as a browser development project had become the "Mozilla Suite" which included things like an e-mail client and even an HTML authoring application. While these were interesting and useful additions to the application suite, there remained only a limited number of resources for the overall project, and so the foundation decided continue development of just the browser and e-mail client as a seperate project. On April 3, 2003, development of the Firefox and Thunderbird applications, a browser and an e-mail client respectively, began.

Version 1.0 of Firefox was released 18 months later, mainly due to the strength of the Mozilla application it was based on. The project already had an excellent rendering engine, and a key feature in tabbed browsing. Firefox simply built on that foundation and improved it. Support was added for extensions, which allowed third parties to develop for the basic application, a process which further strengthened the community approach to development of the browser pioneered by such notable projects as Linux, the KDE desktop and the OpenOffice Suite.

Firefox is now solidly the second most widely-used browser on the web with well over 10% of the market. The second major update to Firefox was released on October 24, 2006, and it is estimated that, to date, Firefox has been downloaded hundreds of millions of times. Firefox now receives a great deal of support from Google, which offers the Firefox browser for download to its users along with a number of features including some Google extensions.

Because of its excellent support for Web 2.0 and standards like XHTML, scripting languages and CSS, Firefox is an excellent general-purpose browser which does a very good job of rendering pages properly with few, if any, exceptions. Firefox is available from a number of sources on the web, and runs on most popular operating systems, including Mac OS X and Linux.