Mozilla’s Firefox browser is about to hit a major milestone: 1 billion total downloads. As you can see on this Twitter account
set up to monitor the download numbers, it just crossed the 999,000,000 threshold earlier today. Judging by the rate at which it’s increasing, it could hit the milestone as early as tomorrow.
And Mozilla is preparing for the big day with a new site (not live yet), called www.onebillionplusyou.com, which will go live on Monday. There, you’ll find information about the one billion downloads Firefox has seen, we’re told. When the browser hits the milestone, more information should also be available here.
Firefox has made a major dent in Internet Explorer’s marketshare over the past few years. The latest numbers put IE’s share just over 54%, while Firefox approaches 30%. That’s pretty incredible when you consider that just a few years ago, IE had over 90% marketshare.
This one billion number is obviously for all the versions of Firefox, since it was launched in 2002 (though the Firefox name officially took hold in 2004). The most recent version, 3.5, launched exactly a month ago. It zoomed past a million downloads very quickly, and had 5 million downloads after day one — a huge number, though not quite as huge as the Firefox 3.0 launch.
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VERY impressive number. Firefox did what so many others (sorry Opera) tried to do and failed.
Unfortunately I don’t use Firefox anymore. At some point along the line, it became big and slow feeling. I don’t know if Firefox 3.5 did anything to improve that (though the whole scanning temporary directories to generate keys?? thing seems to say no), but it was too late for me.
Chrome just grabbed me when I tried it. It *feels* like *nothing*. Meaning I can throw around these tiny windows that are almost devoid of UI. A website in a Chrome tab feels like its own separate application. I drag them across multiple monitors, in and out of different windows (arbitrarily regrouping tabs), close and quickly reopen a closed tab or group of tabs…
Firefox didn’t even add the ability to drag a tab between windows until 3.5.
Agreed, but Firefox addons like Adblock and iMacros save soooo much time. So I still use Firefox.
I wonder if Chrome Addons are every ready….
Exactly.
I don’t understand how people can use the internet with 5 toolbars taking up 25% of the screen.
Chrome is by far the fastest browser, especially in opening new windows.
Big thanks to all Google evangelists there. FireFox is by far superior to Chrome. Since it’s so much better many people write add-ons. You add those add-ons and then your FireFox becomes slower. That’s all. Chrome has no worthwhile add-ons and thus is faster and less leaky.
I just calculated it out (I suck at math, but here goes:
– 23mins ago @FirefoxCounter said that they were at 999,024,648 downloads.
– I subtracted that from 1,000,000,000 and got 975,352 downloads left to 1bil
– 975,352 was divided by 20 (avg of 20 downloads per second) to get 48,767.6 seconds left to 1bil
– 48,767.6 was divided by 60 to find out the minutes left to 1bil, which was 812.793333
– 812.793333 was divided by 60 in order to find out how many hours are left, and that resulted in 13.5465555
SO, I estimate somewhere around 13 or 14 hours until Firefox tops 1billion downloads, assuming that the rate of 20 downloads per second continues steadily and doesn’t go up due to hype, etc.
;]
yep, 14 hours was roughly what I came to as well. thanks for doing the long hand though
I’m still a huge fan of Firefox, so congrats on the milestone.
But don’t get me started with the issue of performance on Macs. Popping up a javascript window brings FF to a crawl, Flash performance is dreadful. I hope some future versions focus on rendering performance, in addition to crushing IE.
IE doesn’t play nice with the flash games we have on our site. FF, Safari & Chrome is all we use here.
Hopefully Chrome will be released soon on the Mac.
FireFox folks should get a Nobel prize for magically getting into the point when 80% of internet folks mind was set that FireFox is the fastest browser in the world.
Whomever did a marketing for Mozilla could easily sell a desert sand at a price of Gold!
If ever interested into subject, you can check many different benchs - Safar IS the fastest browser in the world for a long time now. Not the safest one, but FF is far from being safe either - just lookup online for firefox bugs and security vulnerabilities - there are some serious bugs in FF version 2 and greater that still Mozilla is unable to fix (serious security threads) and that wont probably ever be fixed!
Although its fun to see some folks at my office where getting excited over some new website fire FireFox and all they got is “FireFox is upgreading to version xxx.xxx.xx.x.x, please wait…” for a couple minutes… something never happen to me on IE or Opera.
FireFox2? Maybe you should mention some bugs in IE6 as well… Obviously FF has its flows but it’s not the marketing which made it.
Just curious how to explain FF approaching 30% market share, while Opera insists that MS’s monopolistic practices prevents them from getting more than 1%?
Frankly I don’t know what the 1B mark means. Every time a new version comes up it’s automatically downloaded for me as a FF user so each version issued causes a huge amount of downloads for almost all FF users… I wouldn’t see that as much of an indicator.