This is a new milestone for Mozilla’s Firefox Web browser- it has reached its 1 billionth user download. Company’s official download counter showed this number on last Thursday.

Firefox has reached 1 billion total downloads since it’s 2004 debut.  Along with this statistics of success, it has another standard measures of success- it’s growth. Firefox is showing impressive growth at a time when the long-time industry giant showing decline.

Firefox and the Browser Market

Till July 2009, the browser market has the following statistic (data from Web metrics firm StatCounter) :

  • Firefox holds an average of 30.5 percent of the global market
  • Internet Explorer-60.12 percent
  • Safari and Chrome – 3 percent
  • Opera – 2.65 percent.

Let’s compare this statistics in a year-to-year comparison: For the same time period in 2008

  • Firefox – 26.07 percent of the global browser market
  • IE – 68.64 percent
  • Safari- 3.31 percent
  • Opera- 1.77 percent, and
  • Chrome -NONE.

So, Firefox has grown its user base by 17% and IE has lost 12.4% in the same time.

Firefox and the Future

So, what’s the future? The browser market is changing. Smaller alternatives are changing role of the game. In July 2008, the alternatives combined made up only 5% of the market. But in July 2000, they have a total of 8.67% of the world market (including Chrome). This is a 70.6 percent growth from the previous year.

IE has an advantage in the form of its default preinstalled placement on Windows computers and its widespread adoption within the corporate world. The advantage of preinstalled placement, however, has started to fade. For the first time, Microsoft is shipping Windows without IE preinstalled, due to the European Commission case ’s on anti-competition laws.

But Firefox has a very tough hurdle to cross- corporate browser usage. Most of the businesses use IE for the business. Businesses often question, whether Firefox is ready for widespread business adoption. Mozilla is working on trying to encourage corporate adoption of Firefox.

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