Practical Technology

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One billion Firefoxes

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Let me give you an Internet history lesson. Less than five-years ago, unless you were one of die-hard Netscape Navigator users or a handful of Opera users, your Web browser choices were Internet Explorer or… ah… Internet Explorer. AOL was already abandoning Netscape, but, before they pulled the plug, they started an open-source Netscape spin-off group, which was first called the Mozilla Organization, which became the Mozilla Foundation, so that Netscape would live on. I’m sure AOL didn’t expect anything to come of it. Boy, were they wrong. Mozilla’s Firefox has just been downloaded for the 1-billionth time.

Wow.

Now, Linux is probably more important, there are hundreds of millions of Linux-powered Web sites and business servers. And, Apache is the Web server behind almost all those Linux Web sites. But, for sheer number of end-users, I don’t think you can beat Firefox. And, this success has lead to improvements in all Web browser software.

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