Mozilla Firefox is getting ready to celebrate its billionth download, which it expects to hit any time on Friday.

On Thursday afternoon Mozilla firefox had passed 999,180,000 downloads, which includes all available versions of Firefox.

Firefox, Internet Explorer's main rival is enjoying 31 percent of the global browser market. Microsoft's Internet Explorer is the leader with its 60 percent share of the global browser market.

Chrome, Safari and Opera are coparitively smaller players in the field, each with 5 percent share.

Firefox with its 23 percent share in the Asian markets is lagging far behind IE, which is enjoying 72 percent share in Asia.

However, in Europe the gap between the two is not very much wide, where Firefox rules over 40 percent of the market as compared with IE's 47 percent.

Mozilla is going to launch a new website at onebillionplusyou. com, which will provide detailed information on the one billion downloads milestone.