Firefox, Over A Billion Served

Friday saw Firefox pass the one billion download mark on its browsers since 2004.

Back in 2004 the first Firefox browser peeked its head over the parapets as a challenger to the mighty Internet Explorer. Last Friday saw Firefox serve up its billionth download of all versions of the browser from Mozilla, with figures suggesting that at 31%, it’s captured almost one-third of the browser market.

It still stands behind IE, which has a 60% share, but well ahead of Safari, Chrome and Opera, each of which can only claim less than 5%.

That big one billion number includes people automatically updating to the newest version of the software, as well as users with multiple copies for different computers. The numbers can be tracked on Mozilla’s site, and there will be a new site, OneBillionPlusYou.com, as engineers work on Firefox 4.0.

Last year, when Firefox 3.0 was released, it set a world record by being downloaded more than eight million times in 24 hours.