Internet Explorer rival Mozilla Firefox aims for record number of downloads

While Microsoft frets about Google's increasing dominance in the search market, there is another pretender to its throne as the maker of most popular web browser, with a potentially distruptive technology at hand.

Mozilla, with its highly-popular Firefox browser, has served notice to Microsoft to shake up its Internet Explorer act. Now available in its third avatar, Mozilla is aiming to set the world record for the maximum number of software downloads in 24 hours.

"It's a global effort to make history," said Paul Kim, head of marketing at Mozilla. "There is actually no record for the greatest amount of software downloaded in one day, so for 24 hours from the moment we push the bits live, that's when the countdown starts.''

He said Mozilla had no specific target for the number of downloads it would like to achieve on the day but racking up five million would be "awesome". By comparison, Firefox 2.0 registered 1.6 million downloads on the day it was made available on 24 October 2006.

Microsoft's Internet Explorer (IE) occupies the top slot amongst web browsers, with Firefox a recent second. Of course, that's hardly a fair comparison, since virtually all Windows PCs ship with IE, giving it a 72-per cent share of the browser market. Firefox, which is typically downloaded rather than factory installed, has a 17-per cent market share, followed by Apple's Safari at 5 per cent.

The Guinness Book of World Records doesn't have a current record holder for most software downloaded in a day. Firefox will petition Guinness to accept its record as the one to beat.

New features in Firefox 3.0, which is definitely faster than its predecessor, include automatic warnings when users stray onto web pages booby-trapped with malicious code. Also in Version 3 will be "Smart Location Bar" that lets people return to places they have visited even if they have not bookmarked them or cannot remember the full web address.

The browser manages to do this by looking up the cache or history of visited websites. For example, if a user types in ''flight'' in the bar, a number of recently-visited airline sites are thrown up.

Firefox, first released in 2004, includes tabbed browsing, a spell checker, incremental find, live bookmarking, a download manager, and an integrated search system that uses the user's desired search engine.

Functions can be added through around 2,000 add-ons created by third-party developers, the most popular of which include NoScript (script blocker), Tab Mix Plus (adds many customizable options to tabs), FoxyTunes (controls music players), Adblock Plus (ad blocker), StumbleUpon (website discovery), DownThemAll! (download functions) and Web Developer (web tools).

Firefox runs on various versions of Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, and many other Unix-like operating systems. Firefox's source code is free software, released under a tri-license GPL/LGPL/MPL.