Firefox Market Share Soars on its Birthday

Article by George Norman (Cybersecurity Editor)

on 10 Nov 2009

Yesterday, the 9th of November, was a very joyous day for the Mozilla Foundation and for the tens of millions of Firefox users around the world. The Firefox browser turned 5 yesterday. Yes, Firefox version 1.0 was launched precisely 1 year and 1 day from now. But enough about that. It seems that on Firefox’s 5th anniversary, something amazing happened: the browser’s market share, for the first time ever, grew to 25%.

Firefox’s Ken Kovash comments: “At the very same moment in time that Firefox celebrates its 5th birthday, Firefox has also surpassed 25% worldwide market share for the very first time. This news comes from Net Applications’ report for the week of November 1st. Congrats everyone!”

Here are some other facts about Firefox, facts that show how much the browser has grown over time:

- More than 1 million people downloaded Firefox 1 within the first 4 days of its launch.
- Worldwide, the number of Firefox users grew to 330 million.
- About one quarter of all internet users have Firefox installed on their machine.
- Firefox provides support for more than 70 languages.
- There are more than 7,000 add-ons and more than 30,000 Personas the Firefox user can use to customize the browser.
- Back in August, the one billionth Firefox download was recorded.

And now, here’s a visual representation of Firefox’s market share back in 2004 compared to the browser’s market share today. As you can see, it has grown considerably. Microsoft’s Internet Explorer still holds the lion;s share of the market, but this is only because IE is used in corporate environments. Companies get the Windows operating system, which comes with Internet Explorer, and do not bother changing to an alternate web browser. All the employees are stuck with IE, when many of them would like to switch to Firefox. Check out this video (head straight to 26:30) from July, where an US State Department employee asked Hillary Clinton if it’s okay to switch to Firefox.


If you would like to get Firefox, a download location is available
here.
If you would like to join the celebration, click
here.


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