Andre Yoskowitz
31 Jul 2009 12:08
Mozilla has announced that the popular browser Firefox, currently in version 3.5, has surpassed 1 billion lifetime downloads, a nice milestone for the open source software.
The original Firefox was released in 2004. Depending on what statistics you go by, Firefox currently has 25-30 percent of worldwide browser market share, lagging only behind Internet Explorer which has been losing market share for years and currently sits at around 60 percent. Newcomers like Google Chrome are seeing growth but only have about 2 percent market share.
Just last year, Mozilla set the Guinness world record for most new downloads in a 24 hour period when Firefox 3.0 was downloaded 8 million times in its first day.
The billion download figure, does, by Mozilla's account, include all types of downloads of the software, including manual updates. It also includes users who download multiple copies, normally to place on multiple computers within a same household.
You can check the milestone celebration site here: Onebillionplusyou