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

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: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: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:We've won!

[porkThreeWays]

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