Firefox has hit a major milestone last week zooming past the 25 percent usage share, NetApplications reported. This is a significant achievement for both Firefox that turned five last week (Firefox 1.0 was released on November 9, 2004) and Mozilla, a non-profit organization responsible for the browser’s development. According to Vince Vizzaccaro, executive vice president of the California-based NetApplications, Firefox has attained 25 percent usage share for the week of November 10th. Mitchell Baker, the chairwoman of Mozilla, commented on the milestone: What an exciting milestone for Mozilla, particularly as we are celebrating five years of Firefox this week. The momentum around Firefox adoption has been truly astounding. This means that Firefox is now being used on one in four Internet-connected computers, a noteworthy accomplishment given the undisputed dominance of the various flavors of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer. Firefox’s gains came at the expense of its rival – Mozilla’s browser has been chipping away at Internet Explorer’s share slowly but steadily over the past five years. The milestone surprised NetApplication’s Vizzaccaro who told Computerworld:
We always thought that Firefox would be in a great position to compete with Microsoft’s Internet Explorer if it made 10 percent. Now one in four people globally are browsing the Internet with Firefox.
NetApplications measures browser usage share by tracking 40,000 sites that are part of its survey network. A little over two and a half in four computers run Internet Explorer which remains the market leader with the 63.26 percent usage share. Apple’s Safari, Google’s Chrome, and Opera round up the top five list with 4.39 percent, 3.89 percent, and 2.32 percent usage share, respectively.
Mozilla is currently maintaining three different Firefox versions, two of them being desktop Firefox releases available for Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux. The open-source organization updated the stable Firefox 3.5 release to version 3.5.5 last week. It also posted Firefox 3.6 Beta 1 as the first official public beta of the upcoming Firefox revision promising an optimized Javascript performance, a new UI skinning feature dubbed Personas, and updated platform technologies. Ten days later, Mozilla reported 250,000 Firefox 3.6 Beta 1 installations in the wild. The final Firefox 3.6 version is expected before the year’s end and the release candidate is scheduled for the Thanksgiving holiday.
The open-source organization is also prepping to enter the mobile market next year in a big way with mobile Firefox dubbed Fennec that reached the fifth public beta last week. It features tabbed browsing, touch and non-touch user interfaces that maximize screen real estate for web content, and syncs your personal settings with its desktop counterpart. In addition, Fennec will be the first mobile browser with add-ons built upon the XUL engine found in desktop Firefox
