14 DAY TRIAL // Firefox has become such an integral part of the browsing experience and such a household name that you could easily forget that “just” five years ago it was an up-and-comer in a non-existent browser market where Internet Explorer reigned supreme. And in just five years Firefox has risen to become the major competitor of IE and, in a few hours, it will hit a major milestone, namely 1 billion downloads.
Mozilla is already preparing for the event and a counter has been set up at spreadfirefox.com with about 500,000 downloads to go. And to celebrate the milestone and, maybe, further the adoption of the open-source browser it will also launch a new site called onebillionplusyou.com. For the time being it only features a Firefox mascot that, for some reason, has no eyes and reads “1 billion + you.” A Twitter account has also been set up with information about the number of downloads coming in at a constant rate.
The 1 billion downloads number is, of course, for all Firefox versions, and it doesn't mean that that many people have the browser installed and not even that many people have downloaded a version of Firefox at one point; still, it's not too shabby for a browser built mostly by contributors around the world. Nowadays Mozilla is doing very well financially for an open-source organization, with tens of millions of dollars coming from Google every year, so most of the work is done by paid developers but the browser still has a very healthy collaborative ecosystem.
Firefox use has increased exponentially and the browser has set a number of records along the way. The latest version, Firefox 3.5, reached 5 million downloads after just one day and the latest patch, 3.5.1, has since been downloaded 63 million times. Still, that is well below what Firefox 3 did in 2008 when it set a Guinness world record for the number of downloads in 24 hours, with 8 million downloads.
