Internet users have a wide variety of choice when it comes to online web browsers. It’s through the number of free downloads and it’s regular usage that one can rank the success or failure of the different browsers.

Mozilla Firefox, an open source browser that arrived on the scene in 2004 has reached a significant milestone in announcing that they have surpassed 1 billion downloads. This number includes downloading multiple copies from different computers and downloading for upgrade purposes. It does not include downloads through the automatic update feature that is incorporated within Firefox.

It’s quite an accomplishment for Mozilla. If you went strictly by market share, the most popular browser would still be Microsoft Internet Explorer with it’s 60% reach. Mozilla Firefox would be second at 31% and while Google Chrome, Apple Safari and Opera still have some catching up to do.

The success of Firefox is a success for the open source community at large and what makes Firefox so good is it’s added functionality through plugins, speed and compatibility.

You can track the number of downloads through Mozilla’s new website OneBillionPlusYou.com and we look forward to future developments still to come such as Firefox 4.0.

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