Back in September, the Firefox download counter rolled over the 400 million mark giving Mozilla yet another reason to celebrate over their open-source web browser. At the time, Ryan looked at their current trend in growth and estimated that around April 15th, 2008 Firefox would hit their 1/2 billion milestone. Well, it’s only February 22, 2008 and they’ve just hit their 500 million mark. Congratulations Firefox!
On the Mozilla Blog, they made the announcement and helped show the significance of it by explaining that in terms of dollars, $500 million would be enough for you and 15 of your friends to fly to the International Space Station. In weight they say that it would be like 8,500 Boeing 747 airplanes. For Mozilla, part of celebrating this milestone includes giving back. They’re inviting people to help celebrate by playing a “game” over at www.freerice.com. We’ve written about it before, when you go to the site, a word will be displayed and you’ll be given four difference choices of what the word means. For each word you get right, they’ll donate 10 grains of rice to a hungry person through an international aid agency. On their blog, they said that they are trying to break another milestone by donating 500 million grains of rice in on day.
Looking ahead, given the current trends, it looks like the next big milestone will be around Wednesday, July 30th 2008 when they’ll hit the 600 million download mark. Once again, congratulations to Mozilla and the Firefox team!
Congrats, can’t wait to see them pass IE
That’s just the Firefox faithful downloading multiple copies of the browser file not real world statistics always look at browser share not downloads, the numbers on downloads can be manipulated.
Call me just another Internet Explorer fan boy, but you can’t secure something that ever allows for multiple extensions too be added to it. (Out of the Box it’s fine if left as is) Your just really adding more points for possible “Cracks” to security overall so you folks keep buying the more secure browser experience thing and I’ll keep “laughing”.
I know “Window Snyder” laughs too. When she’s not trying to develop some plug for a security hole within a given time frame.
It’s really amazing where former “Microsoft Employees” show up after cutting “their teeth” at M$, but things occur.
Choice is a good thing; however everyone just don’t always “believe the hype”.
“Internet Explorer fan boy”? Ya sorry, no such thing…..
They’ve got a long ways to go before that happens, but one can wish, right?
Well, Mozilla introduced the in-place upgrade system a couple years back so that users wouldn’t have to redownload the entire browser to perform an upgrade. So some of the numbers are duplicates, but not all of them.
I hope firefox will kick the IE as most popular browser…