Firefox 4 breaks 100 million download milestone

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The latest version of Firefox broke the 100 million download mark over the bank holiday weekend.

Mozilla claimed Firefox 4 hit the impressive number on Saturday, with current figures standing at around 105 million.

Although the open source organisation celebrated its own achievements, it couldn't resist taking the opportunity to knock down its rivals.

Asa Dotzler, community co-ordinator at Mozilla, posted a graph on his blog showing Firefox 4's market share smashing through the eight per cent barrier, whilst its direct Microsoft rival Internet Explorer 9 (IE9) sat at roughly three per cent.

"I'll bet we see a nice uptick in the Firefox 4 trend when we actually start to communicate its availability to users of older Firefox versions," he said. The company plans to "prompt" users of Firefox 3.5 and 3.6 to upgrade over the next 10 days.

Firefox 4 was plagued with bugs and faced several delays before its launch back in March. However, the first 24 hours saw the browser downloaded more than six million times.

Mozilla is already working on the follow up browser Firefox 5 and has sped up the development process to get the release finalised by 21 June this year.

Jennifer Scott

Jennifer Scott is a former freelance journalist and currently political reporter for Sky News. She has a varied writing history, having started her career at Dennis Publishing, working in various roles across its business technology titles, including ITPro. Jennifer has specialised in a number of areas over the years and has produced a wealth of content for ITPro, focusing largely on data storage, networking, cloud computing, and telecommunications.

Most recently Jennifer has turned her skills to the political sphere and broadcast journalism, where she has worked for the BBC as a political reporter, before moving to Sky News.