Firefox the WebKit layout engine instead of Gecko, as with all other iOS web browsers. Firefox was created in 2002 under the codename "Phoenix" by the Mozilla community members who desired a standalone browser, rather than the Mozilla Application Suite bundle. During its beta phase, Firefox proved to be popular with its testers and was praised for its speed, security, and add-ons compared to Microsoft's then-dominant Internet Explorer 6. Firefox was released on November 9, 2004, and challenged Internet Explorer's dominance with 60 million downloads within nine months. Firefox is the spiritual successor of Netscape Navigator, as the Mozilla community was
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