Amid high demand for Firefox 3, Mozilla prepares its open-source software to take on Microsoft, Google, and a world of cell-phone confusionWhen Mozilla releases its Firefox 3 browser update June 17, it hopes to set the first-ever Guinness world record for number of Internet software downloads in 24 hours. The target: 5 million. That would be quite a feat, since the last Firefox update netted just 1.6 million downloads. But it's no mission impossible. Firefox 3 speeds up browsing and adds a host of improvements, including the ability to adapt to your preferences as you use it. Over the past half-decade, Mozilla, an open-source software company, has gained grassroots support from some 170 million users and amassed an 18% worldwide market share, according to Web metrics outfit Net Applications. In the process, it has broken Microsoft's (MSFT) grip on the critical browser market.
Yet just as Mozilla girds for download madness, Web browsing is entering a new phase: It's about to explode on cell phones. Until now, mobile browsing has been frustrating—slow, text-heavy, and hard to navigate. But improvements in software, processing power, screen size, and networking bandwidth are expected to boost the number of high-performance browsers on new mobile phones from 76 million last year to 694 million in 2013, according to market researcher ABI Research. "There's a lot of action to come," says ABI analyst Michael Wolf.
Not to be left behind, Mozilla is readying a mobile version of Firefox 3 for release later this year. One of its aims is to make it easy for people to shift from browsing on their PC to browsing on their mobile and to pick up where they left off. "There's a lot of room for helping people get to Web sites and have rich browsing experiences," says Jay Sullivan, head of Mozilla's mobile initiative.
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