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 [update below, it will hit it 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.
Update: Mozilla has just sent a note confirming that it will hit the milestone tomorrow:
It’s looking like Firefox will reach 1 billion downloads tomorrow (around 3:45 a.m. PT)! You can find out more here: http://www.spreadfirefox.com/fxbillion.
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 would agree with you totally considering that I am using Chrome now and is now my default browser, BUT Firefox still beats it when it comes to usability.
But for a quick browse on the net, posting some links on twitter and such, Chrome is my choice. FLAW in Chrome is that it would seem that each window is a whole new Chrome, so more than 4 or 5 and your computer starts to feel it if it is a regular computer.
Get more RAM. My HP from the local name brand store came with 6GB of it. Never felt Chrome feel slow no matter how many tabs are open.
The stuff costs a few bucks a gig, it makes no sense to waste your time and productivity for years over a refusal to spend a few bucks on it.
Well, all this is very inportant, now it’s really coming BACK 2 LIFE LIKE MJ and myself! About, one month ago after I had a bad break up on the 4 of July. Honestly, thought I was really gonna die this time.Fell on my knees balling,calling out “PLEASE HELP ME GOD,show me the LIGHT!! Well, a few days later Ryan gave Soulja BoyZ CELL! So then I called and left many mess…with Ryan as well. Then, It was DRE who told me abot TWITTER! I never knew how 2 use a computer..I still am learing how to send anemail.Futhermore, AM BLESSED for all the good has came GOD WILL RAIN!
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%?
I don’t think it’s fair to say that you have effective competition when the only proven way to compete successfully is to explicitly disavow the profit motive. Non-profits and governmental organizations do not demonstrate a competitive market place.
- A
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.
“Every time a new version comes up it’s automatically downloaded for me”
These are probably automatic updates (patches delivered by Firefox’s update system) and are not counted among user downloads.
- A
i still love firefox.
I’m using Fx since early 2003 and I don’t see myself make a switch that soon. It was still called Phoenix back then and already got so many things right that other browsers simly don’t. Not even today, IE 8 feels like Fx 2.0 at best, still years behind.
Obvious exception is Chrome, an impressive thingy but useless without extensions.
=====YOU USE STATCOUNTER WHICH IS THE LEAST RELIABLE SOURCE
=====DOWNLOADS DO NOT EQUAL USERS. I CAN DOWNLOAD FIREFOX 100 MILLION TIMES AND IT WONT MEAN SHIT
No one is claiming downloads = users.
Firefox has about 300,000,000 active users. We are not and have never claimed that we had 1B users.
But we count downloads because that is something our community can directly contribute to (see our download affiliate program at Spread Firefox) and see the results of.
Downloads is a good a good measure of “progress” and a step that’s required for adding users.
So, when the amazing community of volunteers that are responsible for the overwhelming majority of those downloads (and the 300 million users those downloads have resulted in) reaches a milestone like 1B we celebrate.
You have a problem with that?
- A
I agree strongly that *Firefox should exist* and, because I am no GoOgle fan, it’ll remain the browser of choice on our Windoze boxes. Chrome may be far faster, but there it is.
As for our MacOSX boxes, I’ve switched to Webkit with occasional visits to Camino, both of which are far faster (at least subjectively) than Firefox.
Too bad Firefox has become so bloated and slow. Even with *no* add-ons it’s a real groaner at startup on both my OSs.
you should try to have profiles. I use profiles as a way to manage when I want firefox to use all those useful plg-in or not. One profile I call Quickness of which has no plug-ins or themes.
Flock is the same way.
Congrats to FireFox. A job well done indeed. they helped to restart the browser wars and it is now in full swing again with google Chrome on the map.
Funny thing though, Opera beets them all rather easily except for firefox (but its still beats it). If Opera was a little more extenable like Firefox, I think it wouldn’t be sar far behind in the browser wars.
Now that being able to contact your computer from anywhere thing still seems interesting though.
Just another update:
http://www.oneb...ionplusyou.com/ is live now.
I just love Firefox. And there add-ons.
That will be today …firefox rox………..congooo to team/……..
The best of Firefox is that it is developed by an independent organization.
I use firefox because it faster when i use with the Internet on my mobile. And would like to use forever.
Oh The million firefox, Chrome ? how much downloads.
I downloaded the latest Firefox, and wish that I hadn’t. It is very unstable. I spend sometimes 30-40 unproductive minutes a day as it just sits there and “spins the disk” .. but doesn’t do anything.
One comment about “getting more ram” is probably one worth following. But still, sometimes the newest Firefox version will just hang. The Ctrl-Alt-Del/Taskmaster shows that it is accumulating more memory, but nothing is happening. Sometimes this happens when the total memory is very small–less than 100Mb even.
I spend a lot of time using streaming video, so I suspect that the problems lie in that area. Hulu doesn’t support Chrome (or it didn’t a couple of weeks ago) .. so Chrome is not as good an option.
I agree with other comments that Firefox is very “slow to the touch” .. and has lost the “sportscar feel” it had when it was new.
Great news go mozilla goo
I USED TO LOVE FIREFOX AND USE IT. BUT NOW I DISCOVERED GOOGLE CHROME AND LOVE IT EVEN MORE!!!!!!!!!! http://asktheco...d.blogspot.com/
hmm. Lately I am not to happy with Firefox. Lot of crashes caused by sites with lot of Flash.