July 3, 2008 | In Technology |
It’s official. Mozilla Corporation scored a Guinness World Record last month when 8,002,530 people downloaded its latest web browser, Firefox 3.0, in its first 24 hours of availability.
Launching more strongly than any other software in history is no small achievement, but it’s a drop in the bucket compared to the past few years of wall-to-wall success for Firefox. The open source browser, developed and maintained by volunteers around the world, has carved a significant niche in the global web browsing market, and is now favoured by almost 20% of internet users.
The strength of Firefox is a great example of how a free market of ordinary people really can make a difference. A few years ago, Microsoft’s Internet Explorer was thought to be an impenetrable monopoly, and it still has a strong hold on the browser market. But Firefox has shown us that serious competition can come from grassroots cooperation of like-minded individuals.
Firefox has shown us that cooperation fuels competition and competition fuels cooperation.
The only truly unassailable monopoly is a monopoly over free minds and human ingenuity. But in a free market of minds and resources, such abuses are not possible. The internet represents such a market, where both free competition and voluntary cooperation are encouraged as natural and productive.
Congratulations to Mozilla Firefox (and all its supporters) for achieving a victory for internet users everywhere.
