The Mozilla Foundation's Firefox Web browser, an open-source alternative to Microsoft's market-dominating Internet Explorer, has been attracting new users at a breakneck pace. Even before reaching its 1.0 milestone, it has doubled its downloads every four months for the past eight. The last two months alone saw nearly 5 million downloads of software.
But the factors driving Firefox's success have already shifted. IE's security woes are on the mend with the company's latest Windows upgrade. And as security researchers and malicious hackers take note of the browser's impressive growth curve, Firefox's good security reputation could wind up the first casualty of the browser's popular success.
For now, however, Mozilla's most pressing concern is keeping its Firefox download servers from crashing. In the hours since Tuesday's expected preview release of Firefox 1.0, Mozilla is well on its way to reaching a stated goal of 1 million downloads in 10 days. In the first five hours that Firefox was available for free download, it was downloaded more than 100,000 times.
The Firefox download site "is totally dying under traffic right now," said Mozilla spokesman Bart Decrem. "We're scrambling to keep it up."
That's a nice problem for Mozilla to have -- and a new one. Since its launch by Netscape Communications in 1998, Mozilla first lagged for 32 nail-biting months before releasing a browser based on its open-source development model. That release bombed.
Subsequent Mozilla-based releases improved in quality over the years but ballooned in size. Last year, code bloat cost Mozilla the Apple Computer account when the computer maker passed it over for the competing KHTML open-source project, which gave the Macintosh its Safari browser.
To produce a smaller and faster browser, Mozilla launched the project that became Firefox after a contentious naming dispute.
While Firefox and other Mozilla products are available free of charge under the Mozilla Public License, and Mozilla itself is a not-for-profit foundation, companies including Hewlett-Packard have implemented the software in commercial products.
Mozilla has recently attracted corporate dollars, including a development grant from Nokia to create the Minimo cell phone browser.
Toe to toe with the big gorilla
Firefox owes its rapid growth in part to Mozilla's early offering of crowd-pleasing features like tabbed browsing and an effective pop-up blocker.
