News of the upcoming release of Internet Explorer 7, as well as an MSN toolbar for IE that adds tabbed browsing have not stemmed the flow of users converting to the Firefox web browser. Firefox has now been downloaded over 70 million times (71332264 at the time of writing) and according to netapplications.com Firefox is growing between .5 and 1% every month and now accounts for over 8% of the whole worldwide browser market share, far ahead of the growth of other alternative web browsers. Those figures roughly match the growth shown by Onestat and WebSideStory but is lower than what is experienced by tech related sites like ours. Although Firefox has had some security flaws found of late, it is still light years ahead of Microsoft improving your security with regards to exploits, Viruses and Spyware, both because it is not anywhere near as targeted by malicious parties as IE, but also because it doesn’t support lame technology like ActiveX, which has been the cause of many an IE exploit.

With the release of Firefox 1.0.5 and the soon to be released Firefox 1.1 the growth should continue unabated and ensure that the “Internet” isn’t synonymous with “Microsoft”.

This article was posted on Friday, July 15th, 2005 at 2:37 pm