Firefox Hits 400 Million Downloads

Owen Dansley writes "Firefox hit another milestone this past Friday, when it passed the 400 million download mark. From its launch in 2004 it took one year to reach 100 million downloads, hitting 200 million downloads just one year later. According to figures released by US consultancy firm Janco and the IT Productivity Center, Firefox currently has 17.4 percent of the browser market — up 5.6 percentage points in the last year. Also within the last year, Microsoft's Internet Explorer browser dropped 9.6 percentage points to a market share of 63.9 percent."

Comments

Interesting

[somersault]

How many of those downloads were downloaded using Firefox? :p

Re:Interesting

[IronWilliamCash]

As per the article probably around 17.4%

Re:Interesting

[svendsen]

So you are saying they are now at the same level as MS? Nice...

Safari

[nano2nd]

It is interesting to note that the release of Safari for Windows has had zero (or negative) impact on its market share. At the time there were a number of naysayers suggesting that Safari would steal market share not from IE but from Firefox.

I'm guessing the quality issues surrounding the Safari for Windows beta have put pay to this concern.

Also, outside of Windows, I thought I'd switch from Firefox on my Mac to Safari following the introduction of tabbed browsing in version 3 but, several months later I'm still Firefox.

Re:Safari

[Jeff DeMaagd]

The initial quality was bad for Safari, but it improved considerably after the first update.

I don't really think quality is the problem. I have reliability problems with Firefox, but I'm still primarily a Firefox user. I think it's a matter of what you're used to and what it takes to switch to something else. I want to block flash on a site-specific basis and there's not a good way to do that.

Also, outside of Windows, I thought I'd switch from Firefox on my Mac to Safari following the introduction of tabbed browsing in version 3

Safari version 2 had tabbed browsing and that has been available since the introduction of OS X 10.4.

Re:Safari

[matazar]

I have Safari install, but I can't stand it.

To be fair though, I don't use Firefox either, though it is also installed. Opera is still the best browser out there.

Re:Safari

[Anonymous Coward]

If you ran a survey to measure how many even know what the computer software Safari is, 80% would have no idea and 19.5% would take the guess it's an expansion pack for Zoo Tycoon 2. I belang to the latter group myself before reading this.

Re:Safari

[TheRaven64]

I found the market share numbers in the summary quite interesting. If IE has 63.9% and Firefox has 17.4%, then this leave 18.7% for other browsers. I wonder what percentage of the remainder is Safari / Opera on the desktop, and what is mobile browsers.

I thought I'd switch from Firefox on my Mac to Safari following the introduction of tabbed browsing in version 3 but, several months later I'm still Firefox. Safari has always had tabbed browsing. Version 3 added the ability to re-order tabs, and detach them (but sadly not the ability to move tabs between windows). It also added the ability to re-open accidentally closed windows (but not tabs) and all of the windows and tabs from the last session (the big feature I missed from Opera).

Re:Does Mozilla/Netscape really make up 29.01%

[Chapter80]

My thought exactly! Who are these 10% using Netscape? They must be AOL users with the built-in browser.