Mozilla Firefox, the open source web browser and the biggest rival to Microsoft's Internet Explorer, is expected to record its billionth download in the next 24 hours.

There is a Twitter account registering each download, with 999,899,812 downloads being registered today (July 31st) at 14:36 BST at a rate of 21.1 per second, it was said.

It is widely believed that Firefox dominates around one-third of the market share for web browsing, with an open community constantly working on updates and fixes to the software which was launched back in 2004.

The announcement of the milestone follows the achievement of Firefox being the most-downloaded software in the space of one day, with the organisation recording eight million hits in just one day upon the release of version 3.

Popularity issues surrounding the browser have also made Microsoft take note, with the firm announcing this month that Windows 7 would make it easier for people to use their own choice of browser instead of its own Internet Explorer.

In a recent survey of SMEs for Connect, the two most important benefits of outsourcing were guaranteed response times and allowing in-house IT staff to concentrate on more strategic issues.