Internet Changes Everything

Firefox Tops Two Million Downloads

NewsFactor Network - - Firefox Tops Two Million Downloads

By Kimberly Hill
NewsFactor Network
September 28, 2004 3:52PM

The Mozilla Foundation says its open-source browser, Firefox, was downloaded more than one million times in its first four days of preview release -- and more than two million times after 10 days of release. Open source browsers are chipping away at Internet Explorer's dominance, researchers say.

In its first four days of preview release, the Mozilla Foundation's open-source browser, Firefox, was downloaded over one million times.

That was six days sooner than the group had hoped: Mozilla had targeted one million downloads in the first 10 days of release.

In fact, by the 10-day point, at just before 4 a.m. Friday, over two million downloads of Firefox had taken place, Bart Decrem, Mozilla's head of marketing, told NewsFactor. The downloads were going faster than any previous release of the foundation's applications.

Assailing the Unassailable

Microsoft Explorer's lead in the browser market once seemed unassailable, but open source-browsers from the Mozilla Foundation recently have been showing some gains. According to Webanalytics Latest News about Analytics company WebSideStory, the users of top-ranked e-commerce sites are using Explorer less and Mozilla more.

A D V E R T I S E M E N T
In June, 95.6 percent of Web-site visitors used Explorer. This month, 93.7 percent do. By contrast, the percentage of visitors using Mozilla grew from 3.5 percent to 5.2 percent in the same period.

Open-Source Evangelism

The open-source community tends toward evangelism, and it is grabbing the chance to point out the flaws in proprietary software used to access the Web.

Mozilla has launched a security-bug bounty program, which pays US$500 to developers and securityRelevant Products/Services from Microsoft experts who identify critical flaws in the Mozilla source code that could expose users to security breaches Latest News about security breaches.

Many in the open-source community are quick to compare this approach to Microsoft's somewhat-guarded stance on security issues with its software.

Fact of Life

Security flaws are a "fact of life" with any software package, Decrem said. However, the "security culture" of the open-source community is much different than that of vendors making and marketing proprietary software. "We invite people to scrutinize our code," he said, which increases the number of minds working on solutions.

In fact, security is one of the most-frequently quoted reasons that people are switching to Firefox. As hackers have gotten more creative, Internet users are becoming more concerned abut their exposure through browsing software. Recent high-profile breaches have influenced many users to switch, said Decrem.

September 28, 2004 at 09:10 PM in Browsers | Permalink | TrackBack (55) | Top of page | Blog Home