The current issue (16.08) of Wired Magazine has a brief interview with Mozilla CEO John Lilly just before the launch of Firefox 3 in June.

Apple's launch of Safari on Windows has already managed to irk a competitor. However, Mozilla's John Lilly isn't upset that there's a new browser in town; what bugs him is how that new browser was introduced. One of the pie charts Steve Jobs used to illustrate browser market share showed only Microsoft's Internet Explorer and Safari, with no mention of Firefox or any other browser.

"...Firefox web browser, which is distributed by Mozilla, has a 28-percent share of the European market, according to a report released in July by French web analytics company, XiTi Monitor..."

So Mozilla has hit the 400 million downloads magic number, well whoopy doo, so what? The important thing is market share, and I don't see Mozilla jumping up and down yelling 'we have 8 percent, we have 8 percent' in fact in the posting they quote the Europe only figure of 28 percent which looks a lot better.

It has been six weeks since Firefox 3 has been released and if we believe market share numbers provided by an ongoing survey of NetApplications, then it appears that Mozilla has had a successful launch with market share gains, especially at the expense of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer.

According to John Lilly, the Firefox web browser has 126 million unique monthly users. A figure extrapolated from an Active Daily Users number of 48 million, itself a massive increase on the 23 million ADU figure from this time last year. So who is John Lilly and why should we take any notice of his figures?

In honor of today's Firefox 3 release, Microsoft's Internet Explorer team gave a cake to Mozilla. The tasty treat, which prominently displays IE's blue "e" icon, just arrived here at Mozilla headquarters in Mountain View.

Apple updated its Safari Web browser for Mac and Windows on Tuesday and offered the new version for download from its Web site. The company also began pushing the browser to Windows users -- whether it was previously installed or not -- via the Apple Software Update, a practice Mozilla CEO John Lilly said is just "wrong."

Mozilla Firefox 2.0.0.5 has been released and is currently being distributed to Firefox 2 users via the application's built-in software update system. The browser upgrade fixes several security bugs, which are detailed in the Firefox 2.0.0.5 section of the Mozilla Foundation Security Advisories page.