50 million Firefox downloads

I was pondering on the thought that Firefox would seem to have an impact as other products of the same genre have gotten in the past -- open source. Surely, Linux and other Unix wannabes rocked the operating systems world in the mid-90s with an approach that embraced the philosophy that everyone should have the chance to be an author; the more authors get involved, better ideas are spawned.

But Linux hardly threatened the UNIX fortress, heretofore the common belief that piracy will kill an industry -- oops I never mentioned Linux is an underground program, only that the people at Berkley felt an honest day's effort of an overworked brain deserves to be compensated -- is never true all the time.

On 29th of April at 8:58AM, Firefox tracked the fifty millionth download -- a testament of half a decade of hardwork which people hoped to switch on amid security threats that hounded Microsoft's proprietory Internet Explorer browser program.

While IE has been notoriously tied as haven for hackers, backdoor programs and phishers, Firefox has been far from perfect either. A recent discover showed two critical security flaws. Firefox automatically allows software to be installed from update.mozilla.org and addons.mozilla.org, but users who want to install software from other Web sites can add to this trusted list. This issue has been addressed in the 1.0.4 version. Moreover, it also fixed the apparent mishandling of dynamic html (dhtml) in the previous release.

I am admittedly a fan of Firefox though I made the switch to the new browser alongside its e-mail client effectively replacing Outlook Express in my desktop in the office and at home.

IE will still be missed though. I cannot work without it. Our intranet application runs on an ActiveX supported browser such as Internet Explorer. Hopefully an alternative to this potentially hazardous feature will be in place for Firefox in order to make missing IE a formality.

Founded with a name called Phoenix and renamed Firebird whose name briefly existed prior to its current name.

Going back to its glitz and glamour of achieving an unprecedented download quantity Don't you think it was amazing to have a program downloaded 25 million times about three months after its release? It's like an online revolution which truly translated the web browser landscape with a major facelift. As the slogan would put it, the browser, reloaded. The Phoenix logo changed after being renamed Firebird and an emphasis to yellowish tail was done on the Firefox version. Why fox over a bird?

Without the need of third party popup blockers and an array of new features such as tabbed browsing, DOM inspector and support for web standards Firefox is my logical choice.

At an astounding pace of about 8% in the total market share. Internet Explorer is still the force but its popularity has dwindled dramatically over the past months. I would like to believe David has morphed into Goliath and want some more.