Firefox, up, up and away...

The Mozilla group expects to run a thank-you ad in The New York Times by Christmas as new market share numbers showed continued progress against Microsoft.

The Mozilla Foundation, an open source group founded by Netscape Communications to develop its browser and spun off last year by AOL Time Warner, has been executing an unorthodox, volunteer marketing campaign. To mark last month's official launch of the Firefox browser, the group planned to take out a full-page New York Times ad thanking financial contributors.

That fundraising and marketing scheme inspired so many contributions that Mozilla volunteers ran into technical difficulties squeezing all their names onto a single ad. Now, with the unsolicited help of an Adobe Illustrator engineer, the group has surmounted those problems and submitted the ad to the Times for what volunteers expect will be a pre-Christmas run date.

Mozilla volunteer Rob Davis, who is spearheading the ad effort, said: "We're looking forward to getting this ad out so everyone can use it as an example of community marketing in action. It was nice to hear from the folks at Adobe and get the tweaks that made the process go faster."

Mozilla, which on Sunday marked its 10 millionth Firefox 1.0 download, has opted for a cheaper rate at the Times by giving the paper discretion to run the ad on any day in a two- to three-week window.

Mozilla promised both a surprise in the ad and a longer term goal of doubling the download number.

A Mozilla volunteer on the group's Spread Firefox marketing website wrote: "Now it's done and we're pushing to get the ad out in the next few days, giving us just enough time to celebrate our 10 million download success before we make a move to double that number! We'll let you know the day before the ad is set to run. You'll want to be sure to stake out a copy for yourself - we've got a surprise for you!"

While the group and its 10,000 donors wait to see their names in the paper, new numbers from website metrics firm WebSideStory indicate that Firefox's first month as a full Version 1.0 release boosted its market share by a point at the expense of Microsoft's Internet Explorer browser.

Firefox has won good reviews and a number of awards. But its biggest selling point up until now is that it isn't IE, whose reputation has suffered amid an ongoing series of security problems.

Firefox's "usage share" climbed from three per cent to four per cent since just before the launch of Version 1.0 in early November, according to San Diego-based WebSideStory, which sells website traffic monitoring software and services. Firefox appears to have taken that percentage point directly from IE, which slipped from 93 per cent to 92 per cent.

Another website metrics firm, Amsterdam, Netherlands-based OneStat.com, last month showed IE dipping below the 90 per cent mark.

By WebSideStory's count, non-Firefox Netscape browsers accounted for three per cent of the market, unchanged from the prior month, and other browsers - which include the Opera browser and Apple's Safari browser - accounted for one per cent of usage.

On a daily basis, WebSideStory derives its global data from the travels of 30 million internet users from more than 200 countries visiting more than 20,000 sites.

Rand Schulman, WebSideStory’s chief marketing officer, said in a statement: "Firefox's gains are clearly accelerating. Much of it has to do with the release of Firefox's version 1.0 on 9 November, after several months of offering a preview version. Firefox's stated goal of gaining 10 per cent of the market over the next year no longer seems unattainable."

Microsoft declined to comment directly on the new market share numbers, but acknowledged demand for competing browsers.

A Microsoft representative said in a statement: "While Internet Explorer is the choice of hundreds of millions because of the unique value it provides, we respect that some customers will choose an alternative. We also know that choosing a browser is about more than a handful of features. Microsoft continues to make major investments in Internet Explorer."

In other Mozilla news, the group said it expected to mark the millionth download of its recently released Thunderbird email management software on Thursday.

Paul Festa writes for CNET News.com.