Firefox has seen a wave of new users recently and the number of active monthly users has increased by 30 million over the past two months. This interesting piece of information came straight from Mozilla, more specifically from the CEO of the Mozilla Corporation himself, John Lilly. According to ZDNet UK, this was confirmed by Mozilla Europe's head Tristan Nitot as well.

The announcement came in the form of a tweet sent out by Lilly in which he boasts that the web browser has been doing great for the past eight weeks attracting 30 million new monthly users and bringing up the total to around 330 million. This isn't an exact measurement as Mozilla does a bit of estimating to arrive at the figure. Still, it is based on solid numbers, Firefox's daily active users, which are now at around 113 million up from 103 million.

"We've seen a significant increase in the number of users for Firefox," Nitot told ZDNet. "Firefox checks for new versions every 24 hours, when it's running, and when it checks, it pings the Mozilla server. We count the number of pings." Based on those pings, Mozilla was able to determine a fairly accurate measurement for the number of daily users. It then multiplied the number by thee to arrive at the monthly figures, based on the fact that most users don't browse the Internet every day and, on average, they use Firefox once every three days. It takes a bit of estimating but the number is accurate enough.

It's not exactly time to celebrate yet, as Firefox usually sees this type of seasonal growth and user numbers have been known to drop off in the past. Still, the five-year-old browser is making good inroads towards becoming the most popular web browser in the market though it may take a while before it reaches that point, if ever. More importantly though, it has managed to erode Internet Explorer's absolute dominance to a more manageable 65 percent market share. At the same time it has also succeeded in doing what it first intended, namely open up the browser market and give users real alternatives while also spurring Microsoft to invest more in Internet Explorer, which has been making real progress in terms of features but also security in the past years.