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Battles between empires started when earth came in to existence. With the changing world technology battles are also growing in number such as battle between various game consoles and  services.  Web Browser extends this battle’s node, as news of various browsers is heating up nowadays.

Mozilla FireFox 3 has already set a unique world record for the most downloads in a day. Ever since its release, Users are downloading new version and according to statistics it has been downloaded 8,002,530 times. Indeed a great number to beat any browser in a short span of time. The company is expected to receive an official certificate in London next week.

But this is not the end. It still has some harsh challenges that actually favours Microsoft, as the majority of users still prefer to stick to a service, they are using since ages. It is may be because notable market size avoid taking risks or they actually don’t know that FireFox has number of features such as plug-ins, customized Tab browsing and user friendly interface that are abruptly missing from IE.

According to the Yahoo news, FireFox 3 has already gained 4% of worldwide market share. But the most interesting part is, out of this 4%, most of the downloads came from users who were upgrading FireFox 2 while very least percentage of IE users switched to the new version. Another notable thing was an increase in the overall FireFox share (from 18.41 percent to 19.03 percent) was noted when IE faced steep decrease in its share (73.75 percent in May to 73.01).

Joint Research by Google, IBM and Communication system shows that 83% of FireFox users are using its upgraded version, while rest of the browser users such as Opera, Safari and IE have relatively low percentage ratio with IE at the bottom line. It clearly depicts that users of these browsers prefer using same old version or the main reason behind usage of upgraded FireFox version would have been an auto-update mechanism, as defined by various researchers.

The share of an auto-update mechanism in rising the % of using upgraded version does make sense as it implicitly force users to try version. Or it can be regarded as a handy marketing tool that allows users to update their current version and some how make them used to it. Whatever would be the reason, Michael Gartenberg, an analyst at JupiterResearch illustrated its darker side as it makes browser more vulnerable to security issues.

"On one hand, yes it does mean you can push out the updates and make everyone implicitly more secure as a result. On the other hand, as we saw with the Sony issue, you could push out an update that does harm. What if Mozilla pushes out an update that has bugs in it or security flaws in it? That would actually make the browser less secure�

He genuinely describes that as multiple drugs could render dangerous side effects and reactions, similarly multi installations of updates can also ends up in system’s instability.

"Automatic updates are fine if that’s the only program that’s installed, but what happens if you have multiple software programs installed with all kinds of updating behind the scenes and those updates don’t play together nicely, there’s a downside to automatic updates."

FireFox 3 has already made its ground. But will it be able to capture notable market share with Microsoft as a giant competitor? What if Mozilla turned off its auto-update mechanism? Will it be still possible for it to stand by its current market share? As Gartenberg stated that setting a record is not the end, it has to face some bitter truth in the form of Microsoft.

"Setting a world record really doesn’t matter. It’s a marketing stunt,At the end of the day you still have to look at who has the overwhelming browser market share. It still belongs to Microsoft."