Mozilla released Firefox 1.0 on Nov. 9, 2004.

Asa Dotzler, Mozilla's community coordinator, echoed Vizzaccaro's take on the significance of Firefox's climb. "Before we launched Firefox 1.0, the people on the team, the eight or 10 of us, said that if we could get to 5%, we would stay alive and stay meaningful. If you don't get to 5%, you don't have a seat at the table."

As Firefox surpassed that share, Mozilla upped its goals, Dotzler continued. "When we got to 10% globally, closer to 20% in Europe, we knew that then we have enough of a platform, not just a strong seat at the table but a strong seat, that when we sat down at standards bodies, we were on an equal footing with IE. We had some authority that our large user base gave us," he said.

As Firefox's share grew, Mozilla's ambitions did, too. "When we reached 20%, we became the favored browser for anyone who understood what a browser was," Dotzler said.

For the week of Nov. 1 through Nov. 7, Firefox accounted for 25.1% of all browsers, said Vizzaccaro. Internet Explorer (IE), meanwhile, led all rivals with 63.3%, while Apple's Safari, Google's Chrome and Opera Software's Opera followed, in that order, with 4.4%, 3.9% and 2.3%, respectively.