At 330 million monthly users, Mozilla’s open-source web browser Firefox is now on par with social networking giant Facebook, and has even surpassed that of the United States (307.8 million). Chief executive John Lilly revealed on Monday in a Twitter post that Firefox has gained 30 million users in 8 weeks, or an astounding 3.7 million people per week.
“We’ve seen a significant increase in the number of users for Firefox,” said Tristan Nitot, President of Mozilla Europe. “Firefox checks for new versions every 24 hours, when it’s running, and when it checks, it pings the Mozilla server. We count the number of pings.” “It’s amazing to have 330 million users,” said Nitot. “That’s the size of the population of the USA.”
According to Net Applications, Microsoft’s Internet Explorer is still dominating the web browser market. However, its worldwide market share has fallen from 71.61% in November 2008 to 65.71% in September 2009. Meanwhile, Firefox has been gaining dominance in the market over the past few months, grabbing a 23.75% market share.
Firefox usually sees a seasonal jump in user numbers in the autumn, according to Nitot, who added that people going back to work after northern hemisphere summer breaks could be contributing to the tally.
“Usually it’s a mixture of back-to-school, and people getting new computers and installing the latest version,” said Nitot. “This boosts our numbers every year.”
What makes Firefox, dubbed as “one of the world’s best web browser” by many, so popular is because it’s free, it’s very fast, and it’s got thousands of useful add-ons to improve users’ browsing experience. It uses anti-phishing and anti-malware technologies to keep users safe while they surf, and its private browsing and “forget this site” options ensures users’ privacy are kept private.
In my own opinion, Firefox will ‘rule’ the web browser market in the near future, but Google Chrome seems to be a strong competitor because of its state-of-the-art V8 JavaScript engine, which loads web pages in a snap. I believe Safari’s and Opera’s market share will head north but not as much as Firefox or Chrome. In contrary, although IE gets smarter and more powerful each time, but many users will still abandon IE unless the folks at the Redmond-based tech giant fix IE faults, especially the speed and security issues.
Via DownloadSquad and ZDNet.