Firefox Celebrates 400 Million Downloads

Congratulations to everyone at Mozilla and Firefox; also to the people who make plug-ins for the browser.

The stats for a couple of sites I manage showed Firefox broswers making up a 10-16% share of the total browsers used during August.

I assume that figure includes downloads for people getting a newer version to replace an older one?

Additionally, you'll have people reloading it onto their new machines, or on recently re-formatted old machines.

In that case, anyone hazard a guess as to what the "installed user base" figure is? I'll guess that it is at least 50 million... and that is still a very respectable figure.

There are also the Mozilla Suite and Mozilla Seamonkey as well as the Netscape variants to consider. I'll guess that pushes the figure past 75 million again.

My site is showing about 20% on Firefox. We promote the "Spread Firefox" on every page though... so maybe the numbers are a bit skewed... ;-)

w3schools.com (I'm assuming this url is fairly "safe") shows Firefox holding almost 35% in July.

Their statistics are fairly likely to be skewed, however, considering that their audience consists of people interested in web design/development.

It's not even close to 25%, maybe half that..

I've downloaded it at least 30 times, more times than I've watched The Empire Strikes Back. Installing Firefox is so enjoyable, I just want to do it over and over

I think I'll go download it again right now

400,000,001...

I've occasionly downloaded it on computers with deepfreeze and internet explorer which are turned off (restarted) every day. Probably no more than five times, but ovbiously there's a huge number of downloads which are redundant/reoccuring, don't get completed, or don't get installed. Not to say it's not an indicator of popularity or use though... it's definately growing, and that's good.

I'm no media junkie so all the manual installation issues of FireFox plugins haven't bothered me at all, and I hope to see that situation as well as HTML rendering issues improve. I use FireFox as my primary browser and love it. I've personally contributed to over 12,000 FireFox downloads, thanks to Google referrals and some healthy site traffic. Thanks Firefox and Google! Let's continue to give Internet Explorer a run for it's money if for no other reason than to vindicate Netscape's brutal murder at the hands of the serial corporate killer Microsoft, (still at large;)

but ovbiously there's a huge number of downloads which are redundant/reoccuring, don't get completed, or don't get installed.

Against that you must weigh the cover-disks which come with Firefox installers, the Linux distributions which pretty-much all include Firefox, etc. etc.

I had overlooked those. Anyone want to hazard a guess at the "installed user base" figure then?

On my web site that is in the wedding industry I have 83% on IE, 10% on Firefox and the rest on various other browsers. On a site like this, of course that figure would be a lot higher, but I think it's closer to 10% than 25%

How come there isn't a users count as well as a download count?
Wouldn't they have something in the install files or existing files that lets them know its an existing user?
Using downloads as a counter reminds me of the way a lot of webmasters talk about hits rather than visitors. It sounds way better that way, still a great milestone regardless.

unless you implement special code in the browser or install, that's all you can do. I guess asking if it's okay to send a little info packet (either on install, every week, or every time it's run) would be okay, but it seems kind of silly for just keeping track of users. Not asking seems like something people could be against.