Mozilla Firefox has just hit a new milestone – 10 million downloads worldwide for its latest 3.5 version. According to its Worldwide Real-Time Counter, United States tops the list with over 2 million downloads, and the countries tailing behind the IT leader includes Germany, Japan, France and the United Kingdom. Yesterday, Firefox 3.5 has made an amazing feat by surging past the 5 million mark in 24 hours, without any much promotion as compared to its predecessor. All thanks to its successful PR campaign last summer, Firefox 3 officially set a Guinness World Record for the most downloaded piece of software after 8 million downloads were made in a 24 hour period.
Although some of you guys might view the newly-launched Firefox 3.5 as “a no big deal”, but according to several reliable sources, it’s beginning to see some traction in the browser market. “The fastest version yet of Firefox has certainly sprinted out of the blocks with 2.06% usage in the US in a short time,” commented Aodhan Cullen, CEO, StatCounter. “This latest addition boosts competition for Microsoft Internet Explorer in the browser market wars.” Dubbed as the “fastest version of Firefox”, the emphasis on this latest version is on speed and performance. Some rumors have stated that even though it’s pretty fast and impressive but it still lack the ability to beat its fellow rivals – Google Chrome and Safari 4 in terms of speed.
With the introduction of 3 new browsers (Opera Unite, Safari 4 & Firefox 3.5) this year, most likely it will threaten Mircosoft’s Internet Explorer’s dominance in the browser market. Within a few days after its launch, 11 million copies of Apple’s Safari 4 have been downloaded on both Mac and Windows (6 million), though at least some of those can be attributed to its OS X automated update system. Despite the fact that many analysts saying Internet Explorer will vanish from the browser market just like NetScape in a few years time, however, only time can tell. Fortunately, its search engine Bing has achieved tremendous success since its launch few weeks ago and now the only headache Steve Ballmer and Co. has got to be its a-decade-old web browser – Internet Explorer.
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