Firefox Holds World Record

The Mozilla Marketing Community reports that Mozilla now holds the Guinness World Record for the most software downloaded in 24 hours. From 18:16 UTC on June 17, 2008 to 18:16 UTC on June 18, 2008, 8,002,530 people downloaded Firefox 3. (downloads, at the time of writing this, are now at 23,340,281) You can read more about it here and see a world map of the most downloads for each country. 180 million users in more than 230 countries use Firefox as their Web Browser. You can download and print your very own personalized Firefox 3 Download Day certificate here.

This is no surprise considering security flaws and bugs for the most part are non-existent in Firefox compared to Internet Explorer. You can read a Web Developer's gripe on how many bugs have been found in IE here, as for someone who programs web applications for IE, he has run into alot of code problems with IE. Cnet News also wrote a piece a few years back regarding the subject here. Security flaws and/or bugs in web development sometimes happen in Firefox as well, but the differeance is that the Mozilla team will fix the bug very fast due to the bug tracker (Bugzilla), DOM Inspector and the worldwide development working on Firefox. Microsoft has yet to fix bugs in IE that Mozilla has already fixed years ago; You can read more about that in a review here. IE also doesn't use the Universal Web Standards called World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). These are guidelines in place for web browsers to follow so there isn't any mistakes in code such as CSS, HTML, etc.

Back in the 90's Internet Explorer and Netscape was competing for browser supremacy, until Microsoft dumped more and more money into IE to seal up the deal. This left Netscape in the shadows, only to be seen as the default browser in AOL. Since then, some Netscape developers took the browser code and left the realms of Netscape. They began to quietly build a browser forked from the Netscape browser, that would be fast, efficient and open source. Making it open source, many programmers and developers had a chance to work on the source code (many working for free in their spare time), ultimately forming a community coined Mozilla. Since then, Firefox has become a dominant browser in the last few years and PC users are choosing it over Internet Explorer even more. Still the average user is still using the web browser that comes with their PC and isn't aware of a far superior browser out there. This will most likely change in the near future.