Firefox 4 passes 100 million downloads mark

IT'S FULL STEAM AHEAD for Firefox as the latest version of its browser software broke the 100 million downloads milestone over the weekend.

Firefox 4, which was only released last month, has seen 100 million downloads in that short space of time, giving it a very healthy eight per cent market share.

This puts the latest iteration of Mozilla's web browser well ahead of Internet Explorer 9, Microsoft's recent attempt to regain dominance in the web browser arena.

IE9 has only a three per cent share at the moment, starting with extremely slow growth and hovering around the one per cent mark for much of March and the first week of April. It only began to pick up speed in the middle of this month.

In comparison Firefox 4 got off to a good start immediately, jumping from two to five per cent in the first couple of days of its release and growing steadily from there.

If such strong uptake wasn't enough, Mozilla plans to promote updates to Firefox 4 to Firefox 3.5 and 3.6 users in roughly a week's time. It expects to see a big increase in downloads as a result, which means we could see it pass the 200 million mark soon enough. µ