Firefox Site Visitors More Than Doubles

The number of people visiting the Mozilla Foundation website where they can download the Firefox browser has more than doubled over the last nine months, a research firm said Wednesday.

In March, more than 2.6 million people visited the Firefox site, a 237 percent spike over June of 2004, when the site met the minimum reporting levels, Nielsen/Netratings said.

Males, who are often early adopters of technology and gadgets, accounted for 71 percent, or 1.9 million site visitors, compared to women, who comprised the remainder.

Firefox, which according to Mozilla has been downloaded more than 44 million times since its version 1.0 release in November, has attracted attention for its features and as an alternative to Microsoft Corp.'s Internet Explorer, which many consumers perceive as less secure.

"The search for an alternative browser has grown in recent years, as the Internet's early adopters have begun to think of the browser as something other than a commodity," Nielsen analyst Ken Cassar said in a statement.

Traffic to the main Mozilla Foundation website has also increased dramatically, jumping 284 percent in March to 4.1 million visitors from 1.1 million during the same period a year ago, Nielsen said.

With Firefox penetration growing, however, Cassar warned that publishers need to make sure their websites are compatible with two browsers.

"It was looking as though Microsoft Explorer was in the process of establishing itself as the standard browser, which was great news for site developers," Cassar said. "With Firefox on the rise, they have to grudgingly accept that they don't live in a one-browser world."

In other news, the top 10 brands on the Internet in March, based on traffic, were led by Yahoo, followed, in order, by Microsoft, MSN, Google, America Online, EBay, Real, MapQuest, Amazon and the Weather Channel.

The top 10 advertisers, in order from top to bottom, were LowerMyBills.com Inc., Netflix Inc., Vonage Holding Corp., Dell Inc., Ameritrade Holding Corp., Monster Worldwide Inc., SBC Communications Inc., Viacom Inc., InterActiveCorp and United Online Inc.