NEWS
Firefox, the open-source challenger to market heavyweight Internet Explorer, has surpassed 10 million downloads in a little more than a month since the browser was released in November.
The free web browser from the Mozilla Foundation surpassed 10 million downloads on Saturday as web surfers continue to move away from Microsoft's market-dominating IE. The milestone highlights growing frustration with the security vulnerabilities that have dogged IE during the past few months. Nearly two dozen holes in the web browser have been discovered during the autumn, ranging in degrees of seriousness.
Niels Brinkman, co-founder of research firm OneStat.com, said in a statement in November: "It seems that people are switching from Microsoft's Internet Explorer to Mozilla's new Firefox browser."
Firefox has surpassed the 10 million download mark while gaining five percentage points in May to 7.4 per cent in November, according to OneStat.com.
Firefox's percentage gain helped cut into Microsoft's dominance of the web browser market, cutting its market share to less than 90 per cent. OneStat reported in November that IE's market share had slipped to 88.9 per cent in the third week of November, down five percentage points from its share in May. Mozilla-based browsers, including Firefox, rose to 7.4 per cent, up five percentage points from May.
Microsoft has disputed these numbers, claiming that they do not represent corporate users.
Gary Schare, Microsoft's director of product management for Windows, said of OneStat's statistics: "It doesn't jibe with what WebSideStory shows, and what neither of these count is corporate intranets where users aren't actually hitting the web."
On Wednesday, the Pennsylvania State University's Information Technology Services department recommended that students drop IE in favour of Firefox and Apple's Safari to reduce attacks through vulnerabilities in the Microsoft software. The university said "media reports" and a string of warnings by Carnegie Mellon University's Computer Emergency and Response Team led to its recommendation.
Steven Musil writes for CNET News.com.
Comments
There are 4 comments. Join the discussion
1. Mark Riley
If users switch to Firefox are they protected from IE's vulnerabilities altogether? Do they also have to uninstall IE to be safest?
2. anonymous
Mark,
You cannot uninstall IE completely as MS has embedded it in the Windows OS. But using another browser such as firefox will drastically reduce your risk of getting spyware and other exploits by malicious web-sites.
3. Roy Corneloues
I'm using firefox and thunderbird as my preferred web and mail clients now.
However because of MS's dominence over the last few years you have a large number of web sites that only work in IE or exploit IE features that are not supported by FF.
So you have a situation now where the success of FF is dependent on the design and development worlds. They will need to switch to supporting the open W3C web standards that FF is built on, or revert back to the old days of coding versions of the site for each browser.
If anything MS's dominence will continue as long as they do nothing to bring IE up to date. So MS will win, but not even raising a finger to change a single line of code...
4. Timothy James
Maybe Apple could develop a Windows version of Safari? I prefer Safari over Internet Explorer on my Mac, seems to unexpectedly quit quite often. The features in Safari are far better and Apple has always been better than Microsoft!