Mozilla wrote and provided its free, collaborative, open-source, not-for-profit software as an alternative to Microsoft's very-much-for-profit Internet Explorer. At the time of Mozilla's emergence on the market Microsoft was haughtily dismissive of the tiny upstart company's attempt to loosen the stranglehold it held over web access (five years ago Mozilla had just 12 employees) and opined that its would-be rival wouldn't last a year. Indeed, back in 2004, Steve Vamos, then head of Microsoft's Australian arm said, " Firefox is no threat to us and there is no significant demand for the feature set of Firefox among Microsoft's users." Since then the prescient Mr. Vamos has vamoosed. He resigned from Microsoft in September 2008 and Firefox is now the second most used browser software on earth. Indeed even Bill Gates himself has admitted to using Firefox but couldn't resist a dig and said "So much software gets downloaded all the time, but do people actually use it?" The answer is , "Yes Bill, they do."
So five years on, Firefox is still very much with us, is gaining in popularity every day and has put a severe dent in Microsoft's hegemony over browser technology for the masses. Firefox is now the Internet access methodology of choice for 24.7 per cent of the world's web surfers. The latest figures show that over the past two months more than 30 million new users opted for Firefox rather than the Microsoft browser.
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