Firefox to reach 1 billion downloads milestone

July 31, 9:44 AMOmaha Internet ExaminerLeslie Clark

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The Firefox browser created by Mozilla in 2004 is celebrating their one billionth download for all versions of the web software.  You can watch the rolling counter via twitter, which stands at  999,935,615 at the time of writing.

Mozilla released version 3.5 last month with nearly five million downloads in 24 hours – about half the number of downloads when version 3.0 was released last year.  A Guinness World Record was actually given for the 3.0 release for the most software downloads in a day, ever.

The one billion number includes every manual download (automatic updates to new versions are not added to the total).  This means that it is not the volume of individuals that mark the download total, as individuals will often have multiple downloads of different versions on several machines, but just an overall tally of total user-initiated downloads since it’s launch five years ago.

Firefox has an estimated 20-30% market share varying between numerous reports and studies, still a long ways to go to catch Internet Explorer which holds approximately 60% of the market.  Google’s Chrome and Apple’s Safari have a combined market share of less than 10%.

Mozilla may have the ability to take a huge bite out of IE’s market, as talks with the European Commission may force the software Giant to remove Internet Explorer as the default browser on windows-based machines and offer consumers a choice of different browsers they would like to use instead.

A website celebrating the victory will be live later today at www.onebillionplusyou.com