The Firefox Web browser has surpassed 100 million downloads just prior to celebrating its first birthday, the Mozilla Foundation said this week.
The group attributed the success of its open-source browser, which has provided the most hearty competition to Microsoft Corp.'s Internet Explorer in years, to a community of Firefox developers who have contributed code and features to the project. Mozilla also cited the Spread Firefox community for the browser's success. Spread Firefox is a grass-roots group that develops, tests and markets Firefox in an effort to promote its adoption.
Firefox proponents believe that it's a more secure, innovative and feature-rich browser than Internet Explorer. And it's the first browser to win market share at the expense of Microsoft's ubiquitous browser. Various researchers estimate that Firefox now holds between 7% and 9% of the Web browser market.
But as it approaches its first anniversary in November, Firefox has also come under close scrutiny in recent months for potential security vulnerabilities. A report published in September by security provider Symantec Corp. said the browser had more confirmed vulnerabilities than Internet Explorer in the first six months of 2005. Symantec was quick to stress that the findings did not necessarily mean that Firefox is less secure than Internet Explorer.
Earlier this week, America Online Inc.'s Netscape division released an update to the Netscape browser that also fixes vulnerabilities in Firefox 1.0.7, which was released by Mozilla last month. Netscape is based on code from the Mozilla project.
The first major Firefox upgrade, Version 1.5, is currently in beta testing and is expected to be generally available before the end of the year. At the same time, Microsoft is working on a major IE upgrade, Internet Explorer 7, which also is in beta testing. Microsoft has said it expects to have Beta 2 of Internet Explorer 7 available before the end of the year.
Internet Explorer 7 will be included in Windows Vista, which is scheduled to be released in late 2006.
COMPUTERWORLD