Are Firefox 2.0 and 3.0 sufficient to cure the Internet Explorer cancer? Well... According to statistics made available by Net Applications, Firefox accounted for a consistent jump in audience in 2007. Mozilla's open source browser increased its market share from 13.70% in January 2007 to 16.80% at the end of December. That's a share of 3% that Firefox dislodged from under Internet Explorer. At the end of the past year, IE killed Netscape, but also managed to become a target for Opera's antitrust legal action debuted in the European Union. At the same time, the overall Internet Explorer domination over the browser market diminished the past year, dropping from 79.98% in January to 76.04% in December.

At this point in time, both Mozilla and Microsoft are hard at work on the next versions of Firefox and Internet Explorer. End users can already access Firefox 3.0 Beta 2 as of late December 2007. At the same time, the Redmond company promised to make available the first beta for Internet Explorer 8 in the first half of 2008. But, will IE8 be sufficient to stop the IE market share erosion catalyzed by Firefox? Either way you look at it, Firefox 3.0 will drop almost a year ahead of IE8. The fact of the matter is that Mozilla will be well on its way with the development of Firefox 4.0, when IE8 will be launched.

In 2007, Firefox 2.0 alone grew to 15.80%, while Internet Explorer 7, although benefiting from nothing but elbow room in the space occupied by IE6, succeeded in becoming the no.1 browser worldwide only in December with 40.61%. Considering the last official counts provided by Microsoft and Mozilla, IE7 had passed the 300 million mark, while Firefox enjoyed an install base of over 1250 million users. But apparently, Mozilla wanted to tip the balance in its favor even more with the "Fight Against Boredom" Marketing Campaign. You will be able to see a video illustrative of the initiative embedded at the bottom of this article.

Apparently, along with the innocent comparisons between IE and Firefox, such as the ones referencing yoga, mountain biking sports and music, Mozilla also slipped in a few pointings at fungal infections, cancer, and heart disease. Suffice to say users were not pleased. As a direct consequence of the criticism, Mozilla temporarily pulled the plug on the "Fight Against Boredom" website and officially apologized.

"Earlier today a still-in-development site for a marketing program we are working on called 'Firefox Users against Boredom' [went live]. The site was not meant to be publicly available and contained several stats, taken from a recent Nielsen study, that were offensive and in poor taste. I want to sincerely apologize for this oversight. We hadn't reviewed the stats before they were accidentally published and some of them are clearly in poor taste and humor. This does not reflect the views of Mozilla and we are working to fix this immediately", Kim promised.