Mozilla is counting down as Firefox rapidly approaches its billionth download of all time.
Firefox 1.0 launched in November 2004 as the secure, open source alternative to market dominating Internet Explorer, which held nearly 90% market share at the time. One year later, Firefox had already attained 10% browser share. Since mid 2008, Firefox has held nearly 30% of the market, while Internet Explorer has dropped to around 60%.
Last year, Mozilla aimed at setting a world record for downloads with the release of Firefox 3.0. and set it with more than 8 million downloads in 24 hours.
Today, Firefox is hovering around 20 downloads per second, and has less than a million downloads to go before it hits the billion marker.
If people continue to download at their current rate, Firefox will pass a billion downloads in just over 12 hours.
Firefox total downloads: millions
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