Top 10 downloads of the past 10 years

By Kelly Green Morrison and Karen Whitehouse, Download.com on 25 January 2006

When our sister site CNET Download.com opened its doors in 1996, it was home to 3,000 small shareware and freeware applications.

Online software distribution was still in its infancy. What a difference a near-decade makes! Since 1996, we've watched the rise of instant messaging, digital audio and the MP3 format, file sharing, spyware and antispyware, and the open-source movement, just to name a few. And we've watched as online software distribution has gone from pipe dream to reality. These 10 applications best represent the top trends in downloading over the past decade.

Click on the links below to see the top 10:

ICQ	Winamp	Napster	Firefox
WinZip	iTunes	Ad-aware	Skype
RealPlayer	Acrobat Reader

ICQ >

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