Firefox created by Netscape in 1998 before their acquisition by AOL. Firefox usage grew to a peak of 32% at the end of 2009, temporarily making version 3.5 the world's most popular browser. Usage then declined in competition with Google Chrome. , Firefox has 11.6% usage share as a "desktop" browser, according to StatCounter, making it the second-most popular such web browser; usage across all platforms is lower at 5.44% (and then 4th-most popular overall). Firefox is still the most popular desktop browser in Cuba (even most popular overall at 62.77%) and Eritrea with 78.3% and 91% of the market share,
Firefox reliability, security, and standards conformance, finishing substantially ahead of Chrome, the runner-up. "Tom's Hardware" concluded by declaring Firefox the "sound" winner of the performance benchmarks. In January 2014, a benchmark testing the memory usage of Firefox 29, Google Chrome 34, and Internet Explorer 11 indicated that Firefox used the least memory when a substantial number of tabs were open. In benchmark testing in early 2015 on a "high-end" Windows machine, comparing Microsoft Edge, Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome, and Opera, Firefox achieved the highest score on three of the seven tests. Four different Javascript performance tests gave conflicting results. Firefox bested