Congratulations to Firefox for hitting the 300 million download mark! This is yet another huge milestone in the book for Mozilla, and one that is surely deserved. Of course, 300 million downloads does not signify that there are 300 million users because many people download Firefox multiple times. I, for example, have downloaded Firefox at least 5 times in the last month. At least Mozilla was able to get the update functionality into Firefox so that people don’t have to download Firefox every time there is a new release.
Where are the Firefox download numbers going to be in the future? I was wondering that yesterday so I went looking for the graph generator that I had found some time ago. The great thing about this utility is that it is all done online and you can use it to estimate the date at which Firefox will hit new milestones by providing a few parameters. Here’s what I came up with:
- 400 million downloads – August 25, 2007
- 500 million downloads – March 6, 2008
- 600 million downloads – September 17, 2008
- 700 million downloads – March 30, 2009
- 800 million downloads – October 11, 2009
- 900 million downloads – April 24, 2010
- 1 billion downloads – November 3, 2010
- 2 billion downloads – February 29, 2016
- 5 billion downloads – February 16, 2032
- 10 billion downloads – September 26, 2058
- 50 billion downloads – August 9, 2271
- 100 billion downloads – September 9, 2537
- 500 billion downloads – May 15, 4666
- 1 trillion downloads – March 21, 7327
Each of those download amounts are linked to the graph that I received the estimated date from, but the trend line stopped appearing after I started doing 10 billion downloads. Luckily it was still able to estimate the date at which Firefox would hit those milestones for the sake of my own amusement. Also, if you click on any of those links you will more than likely see a slightly different date than what I listed above, because the graphs are estimated based upon the current trend. Since the download trend will constantly change the graph will try to compensate and accurately predict the date. It will be fun to see when Firefox hits some of those milestones to see how accurate the graph is.
On a side note, it has been exactly one week since Firefox 3 Alpha 2 was released and it looks like a lot of people wanted to see what all of the talk was about. As FFExtensionGuru pointed out on his blog there was around 32,000 downloads of Alpha 2 according to the last set of meeting notes by Mozilla. I’m actually surprised that such an early pre-release appealed to so many people, but then again it is always nice to get a sneak peek of what the future holds for us.
Source: Mozilla Links [via CyberNet News Forum]
1 Trillion!!! Sweet…I am looking forward to that one.
Well, it might not be something that you look forward to. Maybe your grandkids grandkids grandkids…etc. will see it.
You might have to take the factor that updates are allowed now into account to make this calculation more useful. Earlier, for every new release we had to download FF. So, the numbers would have been higher if only the downloads were counted. But, after the update functionality was added, if the numbers keep growing at the same rate, then it means that there are more people downloading FF compared to earlier versions. This might be considered good news overall. (Am assuming that an update doesn’t add to a download.)
And regarding that 1 trillion: I wonder how humans would have evolved and how FF would have been subjected to the history books.
I mentioned that in the last sentence of the first paragraph, but Firefox seems to be growing at a constant rate so I think this will probably be accurate. Of course, there is always the word-of-mouth growth that is really exponential (you tell 2 friends, and they tell 2 friends, etc…) so the trend might not stay linear.
Not too bad only off by about 2 weeks on the 400 Million mark.
Well, your estimate for 1 Billion was only off by 1 1/4 years.
So it looks like they really picked up the pace.