« The 12-Sided Subwoofer | Home | Microsoft Office Suite - $60 for Students »

Firefox Reaches 400 Million Downloads

By Robert | September 9, 2007

There is no secret that Firefox is one of my favorite Internet browsers and I am really happy to break this piece of news. Mozilla launched this software on the 9th of November 2004 and since that date it continued to rise in popularity among net users. Every year saw the number of downloads doubling and this lead to the current high point of 400 million downloads. Keep in mind that this fact does not mean that 400 million unique users downloaded the browser. I alone am sure to have downloaded it at least 10 times but an average is of around 4-5 downloads per person in the time frame between 2004 and now. It is impressive that around 80-100 million individuals might have downloaded Mozilla Firefox.

The first big player that helped out Firefox was Google by including it in its Adsense referral system. As time passed, satisfied customers wanted more and Mozilla, together with independent manufacturers, stood up to the task. We now have in Firefox the second most used Internet browser in the world. It is hard to imagine it will ever be able to top Internet Explorer as it comes with every Windows system out there but only time will tell if free, open source software will have the benefit over large corporations like Microsoft. Nonetheless, there are many available extensions for Firefox that are not usable on Internet Explorer and the other way around. If download numbers keep rising at the rate they did in the past we might see 800 million Firefox downloads next year.

Share and Enjoy: These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages.