Firefox figures “inflated”?

The chief executive of Opera Software claimed on Monday that the market share figures for Mozilla Firefox are inflated, due to its support for link prefetching.

Link prefetching is a mechanism that uses browser idle time to download Web pages that the user might visit in the near future. This feature is enabled by default in Firefox 1.0. Google added support for link prefetching to its search engine earlier this year, which means that Firefox will pre-load the top search results into its cache.

While it could be Opera that’s ‘jealous’ that Firefox is more popular, it is a valid case. Personally, I don’t use Opera because I don’t want to pay for it, and I don’t want an ad-based version. Firefox is clean free of anything like that, and works just as well. You can check out the full read over at ZDNet.