Mozilla, the company behind the popular Firefox browser, has announced that downloads have topped 400 million, just three years after it launched.

The popularity of the browser, which is the main rival to Microsoft’s Internet Explorer (IE) 7, is growing fast and in the past year, downloads have jumped by an impressive 56 per cent.

According to Mozilla, downloads stood at 255 million in September 2006, with 145 million downloads registered for the last 12 months alone.

Market watcher Xitimonitor.com says the latest version, Firefox 2.0, commands a 28 per cent share of the global browser market. In fact, the researcher said that in July Firefox held the advantage over IE 7 in many European countries.

“The visit share of Firefox 2 is in fact superior to that of Internet Explorer 7 in 16 of the 32 European countries studied - that is just half. But in terms of the level of visit share country by country, the advantage belongs to Firefox 2 to become most popular browser in Europe,” the company said in its most recent analysis.