In a monumental event yesterday, Mozilla Firefox, the web browser that was officially launched in 2004, reached an epic 1,000,000,000 download yesterday. As of the moment, the official Firefox download counter is well over the 1 billion mark.
In just 5 years, Firefox has seen tremendous increase in the users who download their web browser. When they first launched in 2004, Internet Explorer (I.E.) owns more than 90% of the web market share and now Firefox managed to lower IE's share to only 54%, and theirs increased from 0-30%.
The 1 billion download counter is obviously the total number of downloads of all the Firefox versions including the world record set when they launched Firefox version 3.0. Their newest released version, Firefox 3.5 gained 5 million downloads in just 24 hrs. It's a respectable figure, though lower than version 3.0's total count.
To commemorate the 1 billionth Firefox download, the company will open OneBillionPlusYou, a website dedicated to letting the public know how did the download figure came about. This is also believed to be a site where people can share their experiences when they started using the Firefox web browser. The site still has a static coming-soon homepage and will become fully active on Monday.
Firefox came to prominence when web activists started their campaign about Internet Explorer's privacy and security issues. There already other web browsers existing during that time but it was Firefox who captured the hearts and the needs of the netizens. Today, IE has changed a lot and has improved most of its features but Firefox remains to be strong and is expected to go well past IE's total market share in the near future.
