Mozilla Firefox Hits 1 Billion Downloads

Source:http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Search-Engines/Mozilla-Firefox-Hits-by Jano
Mozilla Firefox, the open-source challenger to Microsoft's Internet Explorer, passed the 1-billion download mark on July 31, with a Web site and Twitter feed marking the occasion. Although Firefox has managed to seize an increasing percentage of the consumer market since its original rollout in 2002, its gains have been somewhat slower in the enterprise, where a variety of factors have kept Internet Explorer as the browser of choice for many IT administrators.Mozilla's Firefox browser hit 1 billion downloads on July 31, with the open-source foundation using the occasion to trumpet itself as a viable alternative to Microsoft’s Internet Explorer.On August 3, Mozilla plans to launch a Web site to mark the achievement; details of the site content are under wraps, but the foundation plans on highlighting "how global and diverse our community has become," according to a posting on a corporate site. Mozilla also set up an account on Twitter counting towards that 1-billion mark.Resource Library:Navigating The Recession For Competitive Advantage With IBM's Dynamic Warehousin Stripping Complexity from SMB IT: Virtualization Does It Data in Action: Effective data management for smarter outcomes Integrating SharePoint with Lotus Notes: Drive SharePoint Adoption While Managin At the moment Firefox hit that milestone, the browser was being downloaded some 24 times per second.Since its original release in 2002, Firefox has slowly managed to gain market-share in the consumer market. A report by research firm StatCounter in early July found that the various versions of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer held 54.4 percent market share, down from 65.8 percent in March 2009, while the next-to-newest version of Firefox, 3.0, held a 27.6 percent market share.