Net Applications says that Firefox can have 20% of the browser market share as early as next month. Meanwhile, Internet Explorer’s market share continues to drop steadily.

This will be a major milestone for Firefox. If this 20% takeover will happen soon, it might as well happen on Download Day for Firefox. If Download Day succeeds, Firefox will also grab the world record for most software downloads in 24 hours.

Here at Wordplop, 49% of visitors use Firefox, 35% use Internet Explorer, 5% use Opera, and the remaining 11% use a variety of other browsers. These statistics are from the previous 16,000 unique visitors.

This will be good news for web developers as well. Firefox is much more standards compliant than Internet Explorer. Some standard code that works in all browsers just will not work in Internet Explorer. Most web developers hate Internet Explorer for that reason, so the more people that use Firefox, the better.

The only downside to this milestone might be that hackers will try harder to write malicious code that works with Firefox. Right now Firefox is much safer than Internet Explorer, but as it gains market share, it might become more vulnerable as more malicious code will be written for it. However, this is inevitable with all software, so it shouldn’t be worried about.

Congratulations to Mozilla and all Firefox developers for this soon-to-be milestone.

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