Firefox celebrates five years

San Francisco - The open source internet browser Firefox marked its fifth anniversary Monday, celebrating its rise from an unknown challenger to Microsoft's Internet Explorer to a formidable competitor that has been downloaded over 1 billion times by 330 million users around the world. "Over the last five years we have been setting ourselves up for the next five. The web is moving faster, not slower, and modern browsers are set to handle it," said Chris Blizzard of the Mozilla Foundation.

The browser was built up from the Netscape browser that Microsoft put out of business, and has enjoyed a measure of revenge by effectively breaking the monopoly of Internet Explorer which enjoyed over 95 per cent market share when Firefox was first released.

Now Firefox has a market share of around 25 per cent market, even though it faces increased competition.

"With additional entrants, most notably Google and Apple, joining the fray there's a massive amount of competition in the browser market that is fueling constant innovation and envelope pushing, from speed and features to the development of the mobile browser," Mozilla said in a statement.

Mozilla said it continued to be guided by its original philosophy - that the internet is a public resource that should be as accessible and open as possible. It plans to release the fourth major upgrade to Firefox next year along with a mobile Firefox version called Fennec.