Firefox passes one billion downloads

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The Firefox logo. Mozilla announced Friday that it had passed one billion downloads of Firefox, its Web browser that has gained popularity as a free alternative to Microsoft's ubiquitous Internet Explorer.

Mozilla announced Friday that it had passed one billion downloads of Firefox, its Web browser that has gained popularity as a free alternative to Microsoft's ubiquitous Internet Explorer.

The Mozilla Foundation, a nonprofit organization which builds and refines public, open-source software through a network of volunteers around the world, made the announcement on the Mozilla blog.

It said the figure of one billion downloads was based on user-initiated downloads of Firefox, not automatic updates.

Mozilla claims to have 300 million active users of its browser, which was launched in November 2004.

Mozilla last month released the latest version, Firefox 3.5, claiming it was more than two times faster than Firefox 3 and 10 times faster than Firefox 2 on complex websites.

According to research firm Net Applications, Internet Explorer has a 65 percent share of the Web browser market, followed by Firefox with around 22 percent, Apple's Safari with around eight percent and Google's Chrome with around two percent.

(c) 2009 AFP

   

• Lazlor - Jul 31, 2009
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  I have a theory that a lot of people use Firefox as their second browser for when they are venturing in unsafe web territory.
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• Velanarris - Jul 31, 2009
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  I have a theory that a lot of people use Firefox as their second browser for when they are venturing in unsafe web territory.

  
  
  Not since IE8. IE87 is pretty slick and a lot less noisy than IE7.
  
  IE 7 helped firefox the most. The constant prompting everytime you pushed a button was brutal.
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• farahikia_1983 - Aug 02, 2009
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  I have used Firefox, IE and Opera. I shall admit that Firefox satisfies me a lot in many cases, but there are still times I have no other alternative but to use IE. That's when I fill in a form in the web, but the fields seem incompatible with Firefox and keep showing the empty field error. one other setback to Firefox is it's unable to save web pages in .mht format. I love this format which is supported by IE and opera. Opera is fast and I like it, and IE is the most compatible browser.
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