Mozilla Firefox 1.0 Ready For Primetime
After years of reinventing the wheel with the Mozilla browser, Mozilla seems to have struck a gold stake into the heart of Microsoft with Firefox. As popular as Mozilla’s open source browsers have been in the tech world, that niche popularity was a whisper to the screaming Firefox that has become the “ready for primetime” alternative to Internet Explorer. Today’s release of the final version of Mozilla Firefox comes after heated numbers of preview version downloads hitting the 5 million mark and adaptation of Firefox into the homes and workplace by a generation of web users sick and tired of spyware, adware, and security holes.
Today is Firefox’s D-Day as they officially announce their presence to whole world via a full-page advertisement in the New York Times accompanied by an all out press onslaught. Mozilla’s Firefox browser now has a 6 percent share of the browser market – up almost 3 percent from June numbers, Internet Explorer is down to almost 90%. If Firefox can succeed in upstaging Internet Explorer by dropping IE’s usage numbers even more, we’re looking at a potential Mozilla browser market share of more than 10%.
Search Engine Journal’s Sushubh Mittal chimes in “Firefox is not just another application from the Open Source Community. It is something that is aimed to practically take back the web from Microsoft’s monopoly in the Internet Browser market. Internet Explorer holds around 90% of the market share (take or remove few percentage points).”
A recent study shows that Microsoft browser usuage is heading towards a steady decline since IE browsers were 95.5 percent of users in June, 93.7 percent in September, and 92.9 percent in October. Furthermore, Mozilla browsers are seeing a steady incline to 6 percent of users in October, increasing from 5.2 percent in September and 3.5 percent in June. That 6 percent was split evenly between the Mozilla and Firefox browsers. Sure 6% of the market is not a huge number, but one of the major factors of the switch from IE to Mozilla based browsers seems to be security.
Destructive adware and spyware companies are not targeting Mozilla browsers as they are Microsoft and unlike 3 months ago, the average US user is hearing more and more of Firefox. Microsoft better get their act together, because they now have a serious competitor in the browser market with Firefox, and the downloading of a browser can be seen as a gateway trend – leading to an additional Microsoft market loss in search and operating systems.
Download Firefox here (at press time it seemed that the site was quite slow).
