Firefox Surpasses 100 Million DownloadsFirefox Surpasses 100 Million Downloads

The Mozilla Corp. on Wednesday said the Firefox browser has exceeded more than 100 million downloads since its release nearly a year ago.

The commercial arm of the nonprofit Mozilla Foundation said downloads of the open-source browser have exceeded expectations since its release last November. The next major upgrade, Firefox 1.5, is scheduled for release later this fall.

Despite the number of downloads, Firefox appears to have stalled in the browser market after grabbing a few percentage points from Microsoft Corp.'s Internet Explorer, which dominates.

Firefox lost more than three-quarters of a percentage point in September, the second slip in three months, according to Web site analysis firm Net Applications. The browser's market share fell to 7.55 percent from 8.27 percent in August, and has been losing ground since its high of 8.71 percent in June. Microsoft, on the other hands, topped 86 percent in September.

In other Firefox news, the Mozilla Foundation-sponsored Spread Firefox marketing site is back up and running, two weeks after it was taken offline because of a second hack that may have exposed registered users' information.