Firefox is the spiritual successor of Netscape Navigator, as the Mozilla community was created by Netscape in 1998, before its acquisition by AOL.[17] Firefox was created in 2002 under the codename "Phoenix" by members of the Mozilla community who desired a standalone browser rather than the Mozilla Application Suite bundle. During its beta phase, it 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. It was released on November 9, 2004,[18] and challenged Internet Explorer's dominance with 60 million downloads within nine months.[19] In November 2017, Firefox began incorporating new technology under the code name "Quantum" to promote parallelism and a more intuitive user interface.[20]