Firefox started out in 1998 under the Mozilla project – an open source created by a team from Netscape. It was intended to harness the creative power of thousands of programmers on the Internet and fuel unprecedented levels of innovation in the browser market.
It is an open source that has been evolved from the first launch and to its own software. It is free to everyone to use and everyone is welcome to contribute to the community.
2002 – Mozilla 1.0. was released with many improvements to the browser, email client, and other application including the suite. Mozilla was later renamed to Firefox.
2003 – Mozilla Foundation was founded, an independent non-profit organization supported by individual donors and a variety of companies. The foundation supports openness, innovation and opportunity on the internet.
2004 – Firefox 1.0 was released and it became a huge success – in less than a year, it was downloaded over a 100 million times. Since then, Firefox has a steady release with new improvement as well as new products to the market.
In 2013, we launched Firefox OS to unleash the full power of the Web on smartphones and once again offer control and choice to a new generation of people coming online.
Mozilla Open Software Patent Initiative
A royalty-free non-exclusive license to all of Mozilla’s patents under the Mozilla Open Software Patent License (MOSPL). The MOSPL grants you a license to make, use, or distribute any software that would be covered by one of our patents.
To sump up, Firefox has evolved from just Communicator source code to a full open source software. Product delivery has changed to accommodate different users all over the world. The increase in online present has shaped Firefox features/products as shown above. As a result, user interactions with Firefox product are different from before in a good way. Firefox makes it easy for user to control how their behaviors are stored or tracked and they can monitor or delete their own history. It is a user first approach style.
Reference
History of the Mozilla Project, Accessed on 11/17/2020 https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/history/
A lot of people I know choose to trust Firefox instead of Chrome.
Well you can count me. I used Chrome before but just switch to Firefox because of the trust issue too.