Firefox Completes Five ‘Browsing’ Years

Don’t tell me that you haven’t used Mozilla Firefox browser yet? That sentence wasn’t written to make this article interesting but to actually suggest you to stop using the Internet if you haven’t used Firefox. As of now, Mozilla Firefox has been downloaded over 1 billion times by around 330 million users all around the planet. And the best part is that all this has happened in the span of only five years.

November 9th, 2004 marked the launch of an open source browser which later on hit Microsoft’s Internet Explorer real hard. Since then the journey of Mozilla Firefox hasn’t stopped. On 9th November 2009 it touched the landmark of 5 years with over a billion downloads. Statistics reveal that one of the every 4 Internet users have used Firefox. The open source features have helped Firefox become available in over 70 languages and developers around the planet have successfully created around 7000 add-ons for different features not available in the default download.

“Over the last five years we’ve been setting ourselves up for the next five. The web is moving faster, not slower, and modern browsers are set to handle it,” said Chris Blizzard of the Mozilla Foundation.

Mozilla Firefox was actually built from the Netscape browser which was left out of business by Microsoft. 95 percent of the market share was under the control of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer when Mozilla Firefox was first released. All that now just seems to be another fairy tale.

‘With additional entrants, most notably Google and Apple, joining the fray, there’s a massive amount of competition in the browser market that is fueling constant innovation and envelope pushing, from speed and features to the development of the mobile browser,’ Mozilla said in a statement.