A preview release of Firefox available since last month has been downloaded over eight million times, the Mozilla Foundation said in a press release Tuesday.

Firefox 1.0 is available in 12 languages for Microsoft's Windows, Apple Computer's Mac OS X and Linux. The product can be obtained through Mozilla's Web site (http://www.mozilla.org) as a free download, or in CD format with a user's manual for $14,95.

The result of an open source project, Firefox became a reality "thanks to the tireless efforts of hundreds of community volunteers and developers around the world," the foundation says.

Firefox 1.0 features an integrated pop-up ad blocker, and safeguards against online scams such as phishing and spoofing by displaying secure sites' identities, the foundation adds.

The product also attempts to improve the browsing experience by consolidating multiple Web pages into a single Window and organising them with tabs, a feature that the Mozilla Foundation calls "tabbed browsing".

For those concerned about a bumpy migration to Firefox from other browsers, the product can import bookmarks, passwords and cookies.

The Mozilla Foundation, based in California, is a non-profit organisation founded in July 2003 to support the Mozilla open source software project, launched by Netscape Communications in 1998.