Mozilla Corp. announced yesterday that its Firefox browser had surpassed 100 million downloads since its release roughly one year ago. The company stated that the figures have exceeded expectations since the release last November.

However, despite the milestone, Firefox has lost momentum in its market share gains versus Microsoft’s Internet Explorer after initially gaining a few percentage points. In September Firefox lost another three quarters of a percentage point – its second loss in three months. The open-source browser’s market take is down from 8.71 percent in June to 7.55 percent as of the end of September.

Source: Information Week

the Mozilla Foundation-sponsored Spread Firefox marketing site is back up and running, two weeks after it was taken offline because of a second hack that may have exposed registered users’ information. (ibid.)

What can I say. Firefox’s extraordinary abilities are a hype. This is merely a browser skeleton, “same ol’” Netscape shattered to pieces, and the main piece is not too useful without numerous plug-ins which are mostly being made by third parties and as such bear almost no common style. Whereas Opera and IE are the real browsers with lots of features – and you can add plug-ins to them, too.

Recently it started to be obvious, that “Firefox is secure” mantra is rubbish, just a pretty legend… and Firefox is nothing special – once the hackers turned their attention focus to Firefox, the vulnerabilities came to light and their numbers started to rapidly increase.

So… the conclusion is… power to the real browsers, IE and Opera, and see where we end up with this competition. IE7 from Vista pre-beta 2 starts to display new shape (much less buttons, tabs, and cool interface) – and I’m excited to say, we’re probably one step closer to pushing the loudly yapping and really annoying red fox off the Earth’s face.