Five million Firefoxes released into the wild

Firefox browser passed the 5 million download mark on Monday, beating all previous records of a Mozilla-based browser, according to the Spread Firefox Web site.

The browser beat its initial goal of 1 million downloads four weeks ago and is still being downloaded at a rate of 125,000 per day, although one posting on the Web site expressed concerns that the rate of downloads appears to be tapering off.

David McGuinness, a Mozilla contributor, said that the interest in the browser has been sparked by problems with Microsoft Internet Explorer. "Firefox is increasingly becoming the browser of choice for people fed up with spyware and other internet annoyances," said McGuinness.

Mozilla developers expect even more interest in the browser once the final version of 1.0 comes out around 9 November, according to McGuinness.

James Governor, an analyst at Red Monk, said that it is not just Web users that are interested in Firefox. software vendors are also showing an interest. "For the last seven years ISVs generally supported IE only, now that’s changing," said Governor. "We are starting to see ISVs developing Web applications which support both IE and Firefox."

At the time of writing, Firefox had an 95 percent approval rating from silicon.com sister site ZDNet UK readers. You can download it and rate it yourself here.

Ingrid Marson writes for ZDNet UK