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

[morgan_greywolf]

Or were installed as part of a Linux distro? Or were downloaded from PortableApps.com? Or were downloaded as part of some 'open source CD for Windows'? Or were just copied from a friend? How many are installed as part of a standard corporate desktop image?

How many were updates? How many were downloaded to replace another copy after say, a wipe-and-reinstall? How many were downloaded, but never installed?

Anyway you look at it, counting downloads doesn't reveal much about the number of Firefox users?

Re:Interesting

[Colin Smith]

No, but it's the same propaganda that Microsoft uses.

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

[Anonymous Coward]

I've never heard of Safari?

www.apple.com/safari

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

[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:Safari

[Jeff DeMaagd]

I want to block flash on a site-specific basis and there's not a good way to do that.

I want to clarify this to say that there's not a good way to do this in Safari. There are some ways, but they aren't very good, definitely not as good as FlashBlock.

Re:Safari

[Intron]

Looking over my website hits, it looks like 70% IE, 27% Mozilla, 0.3% Opera, a few Nokia or Blackberry and the rest is spiders. What does Safari identify as? I'm not seeing it at all in 30,000 hits.

Re:Safari

[Gilesx]

It's a version of Firefox for smug people.

Re:Safari

[Oddscurity]

Windows Input Method Editor is what the GPP was probably talking about.

Re:Safari

[Lars T.]

It's a version of Firefox for smug people. No, that would be Camino

Thats not really so impressive......

[budword]

Unfortunately I'm responsible for at least half of those....once for each time I've had to re-install.....

Re:Thats not really so impressive......

[SolitaryMan]

Unfortunately I'm responsible for at least half of those....once for each time I've had to re-install.....

And I'm responsible for none of those despite the fact that I did Linux install 200 million times for the last three years, so we kinda cancel each other out.

Which means?

[AmIAnAi]

Numbers like these are essentialy meaningless. They don't readily translate to installed copies or active users. I've dowloaded Firefox and Thunderbird at least 10 times in the process of setting up new OS installs for family PCs. But that only equates to three users. And of those, I am the only one who actively uses Firefox.

Re:Which means?

[BlueParrot]

Sure, the numbers are not precise. 400 million could translate to only 100 million users, or even less, but there is still some level of information in there. That is, we know that the ballpark figure of a program which had 400 million downloads is likely to be higher than a program which only had 10.000 downloads. It is called uncertainty. Some numbers ( such as important physical constants ) are known to a very high precision, other numbers may be more difficult to measure, and are accurate within maybe a factor of 10 or so. As a friend of mine put it. "To a mathematician pi can be expressed as a converging series of fractions, to a physicist it is close to 3.14, to us engineers it is roughly 3, everything is linear, and 3inches of steel ought to be enough, so make it 10 just to be sure..." He was joking of course, but even if only 1% of downloads translate to actual use, 400 million is still a large number, and different uncertainties cancel ( i.e, many users get their copy of a mirror or dedicated repository. Companies download it once and push it to 300 computers etc ... ). 400 million is a "rough" number, but it isn't completely meaningless.

Re:Which means?

[Jeff DeMaagd]

It probably pays to check their methodology. I think every x.x.x.1 update download might count as a download. For me, that would count for more than 10 downloads for three different computers, one user.

IE isn't down and out yet

[dontspitconfetti]

Despite Firefox gaining some popularity (and Safari showing up in random places, like your Grandmother's house) IE still has a sweaty, firm grip on the market.

Mozilla Firefox has a journey ahead of them before the numbers start to show in their favor.

Re:Ahem...

[quantum bit]

If you look at those usage statistics, Firefox is only a fragment below IE6, and quite a bit above IE7. Of course, I have no way of knowing how accurate these are, but I tend to trust W3 content.

1. w3schools.com is not operated by the W3C.
2. The page you linked mentions that the usage stats for a site geared toward web developers will be skewed toward alternative browsers

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.

We've won!

[WhiteWolf666]

Not that we can rest on our laurels, but Firefox has reached the market share level that really matter; "adequate penetration".

Misquoting the Supreme Court, I can't define exactly what that is, but I know it when I see it.

Firefox is a real force in the realm of web browsers. Even if it hovered at 17-18% forever, that would be enough to insure that most websites, and most webapps support Firefox. Even Microsoft's latest web offerings work on Firefox (Windows Live, Silverlight, etc. . .). That's a huge deal.

We don't need to dominate the market (OSS). It's nice when we do, but its not necessary. All that is necessary is for OSS software to have enough of a toehold to remain relevant in the minds of web developers. Few companies are willing to discard 1/5-1/6 of their customers.

If Linux could ever get to 15-17% desktop marketshare, we would see tons of Linux games. Not 100% of games would be ported, but many, many games would be.

Gratz Firefox! Gratz Mozilla Foundation! You did it.

Re:We've won!

[porkThreeWays]

Browsers are like girls. As long as your get adequate penetration you are pretty much ok.

auto-update doesn't count

[cyfer2000]

auto-update is not count as download. The 400 million number doesn't include auto-update.

Sigh, if only it were true!

[tjstork]

IExplore is only a U/I wrapper around a collection of objects that IE exposes. Some of those objects are used by the shell. This is why Microsoft walked into court, correctly, and said that IE was a part of the operating system, and, if you got rid of everything that was truly a part of IE, the desktop would not work. But, hey, that's just Microsoft saying that.... I'm just going by what Bill Gates, Steve Ballmer and all the other guys said at the Netscape trial, and continue to say...

"It's all integrated!!!" So be it. And Firefox is better, because it's NOT.

That's horrible!

[jollyreaper]

400 million downloads. Just think of the revenue they're losing due to that piracy. :(