The Firefox Web browser is high-speed approaching its billionth download as well as is probable to strike that milestone some time on today.

Mozilla has a Web site with a Twitter feed where community can keep chase of the total. On Thursday afternoon, the feed showed more than 999,180,000 download, with about 15 more occurrence every second.

Mozilla whispered firstly that it estimated to strike the billion spot a bit over the weekend. An hour presently, as the news trickle out as well as the speed of downloads enlarged, Mozilla revised its estimation on today. A fanatic Web site with a "Firefox Download Guesstimator" predicts it will achieve a billion marks on today by noon.

The figure consists of all editions of Firefox as the first launch in 2004. If a single user downloaded many copies for unusual computers, they are all counted in the overall. And if a user goes to the Web site to download an update to a presented edition, in its place of coming up for the automatic download, that is counted as well. Automatic updates are not integrated in the total.

So the figure does not mean that 1 billion people are using Firefox. Still, it's a major accomplishment for a piece of application that was anonymous to most of the globe just a few years ago, and one that has had to contend with Microsoft's Internet Explorer, which ships free with all Windows computer.

Firefox is stronger in Europe, wherever it has 40 percent of the market to IE's 47 percent. In Asia, Firefox has 23 percent to IE's 72 percent. In Antarctica, Statcounter says, the browsers are equal.