14 DAY TRIAL // If you could name just one feature that made Firefox as popular as it is today, most people would probably say add-ons. A great idea that turned into an indispensable feature which most other browsers, including Safari recently, have adopted. Mozilla is now announcing that, in the five years they’ve been available, Firefox add-ons have been downloaded two billion times. Half of that was just in the past couple of years.
“This morning, addons.mozilla.org reached a huge milestone: we served our 2 billionth Firefox Add-on download. This exciting feat was made possible by the huge community of people who have made and used Firefox Add-ons since we launched in 2005,” Mozilla announced on its add-ons blog.
“When we reached 1 billion Firefox Add-on downloads in November 2008, we thought it would take us less than 3 years to get to the next billion, and with your help, we’ve gotten to 2 billion in half that time!,” the announcement added.
While the first billion add-on downloads took three and a half years to complete, the second billion only took about a year and a half. Of course, downloads don’t equal usage, but 150 million add-ons are in use every day according to Mozilla.
There’s a perfectly good explanation for the discrepancy, people tend to reinstall their browser and there are probably very few people who haven’t done a fresh install, which means re-installing the add-ons as well, in the past five years. At the same time, not all add-ons are great and many do get removed very shortly after they’ve been installed.
The number of add-on downloads is influenced by many factors, but a big one is how popular Firefox is. More Firefox users means more add-ons being installed. From the graph Mozilla has provided, it’s pretty evident that there has been a slowdown in add-on downloads which can probably be attributed to the slowing growth Firefox is seeing especially with Google Chrome becoming more and more popular.
