Firefox has finally reached its goal of 1 billion downloads today, which the company originally had expected to reach sometime this week.

The Mozilla Foundation officially announced one billion downloads of Firefox on its Mozilla blog. The download was based on user- initiated downloads and not by automatic updates the company claimed.

Firefox has gained popularity as a free Web browser alternative to Microsoft Internet Explorer.

The nonprofit organization builds and refines public, open-source software through a network of volunteers around the world.

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