While Apple celebrated 11 million downloads of Safari 4 in the first three days of its release, another web browser had a milestone of its own – Mozilla’s Firefox 3.0.11 update was downloaded an impressive 150 million times in the first 24 hours of its release.
“I just read that Apple is reporting 11 million Safari 4 downloads in just three days. That’s pretty amazing. I’d like to follow up that report with one of my own. Firefox 3.0.11 was downloaded about 150 million times in the last 24 hours,” said Asa Dotzler, community co-coordinator for Mozilla marketing projects.
Mozilla 3.0.11 was released on 11 June as a security and stability update with a list of fixed bugs, including issues the internal database, SQLite.
While Firefox is clearly ahead of Safari in the download stakes, Microsoft’s Internet Explorer (IE) used to be overall champion in the battle of the browsers, but the year has seen a major shift in allegiance.
Numbers on W3schools.com from May 2009 show that between IE 6, 7 and 8, Microsoft has 41pc of the global browser market, in comparison with Mozilla’s 47.7pc for Firefox and Apple’s 3pc sliver of the market for Safari.
In May 2008, IE held over half of the browser market share globally at 54.5pc, while Firefox had 39.8pc and Apple had 2.4pc. So while IE steadily declines, former underdogs Firefox and Safari are gaining new users by the day.
By Marie Boran
