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24 March 2011 ,
Written by Dhruv Tanwar
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Mozilla's Firefox, the community developed open source browser from the Mozilla Foundation, debut its latest version, numbering 4, on Tuesday. According to Mozilla's download statistics tally, the browser was downloaded over seven million times with the first 24 hours of its launch, almost three times the 2.4 million downloads boasted by Microsoft for its recently released Internet Explorer 9.
While Internet Explorer 9 leverages hardware acceleration using Vista and Windows 7 DirectX multimedia APIs, Firefox, on the other hand, leverages the appeal of an updated browser for the world's legacy Windows XP systems while simultaneously appealing to Linux, Windows, and Mac OS users. According to research firm Net Applications February 2011 data, over half the world still runs on Windows XP, while around 34% runs on either Windows Vista or Windows 7. Close to 5% runs on Mac OS versions, while just under a percent are Linux users. Consequentially, the addressable universe of users for Firefox is much larger than that of IE9, which is evident from its download popularity.
Firefox 4 features include tab groups, a do-not-track option, addons, and performance upgrades, and is available for download at www.firefox.com. |