14 DAY TRIAL // When it first came about, Firefox was a knight in shining armor. IE was dominating and bent the web to its will, standards were whatever MS wanted them to be and new versions of a browser came about once every few years.
Firefox changed all that with a fast, standard-compliant browser, with tabs and plenty of other new features.
Crucial among those was add-on support. Add-ons completely transformed the browser space and made Firefox the great browser that it is.
While Chrome can boast plenty of add-ons, or extensions as Google calls them, as well, Firefox still takes the crown in the total number of add-ons and installs.
In fact, Mozilla has recently celebrated a major milestone, the 3 billionth add-on download. Since Firefox came about, 3 billion add-ons have been downloaded and installed.
Granted, the same people downloaded the same add-ons several times over time, but it's still a major number.
These are just the add-ons from Mozilla's official gallery and the number doesn't include theme downloads. Overall, Mozilla says, 85 percent of Firefox users have at least one add-on installed. Users that have add-ons have on average five of them installed.
"The most popular add-ons include AdBlock Plus, Firebug, NoScript, Personas Plus and Video DownloadHelper. Most popular categories include privacy and security, search tools, bookmarks and themes," Mozilla explained.
"There are more than 150,000 user-created collections of Firefox Add-ons to choose from, including Family Organizer, Traveler’s Pack, Sports Fanatic, The Paranoid Kit, Web Developer’s Toolbox and Online Shopping," it said.
The top downloaded list is also interesting. At the very top there is AdBlock Plus, indicating that most people don't like ads crowding the sites they visit. Firebug is the second most downloaded add-on.
The suite of developer tools has been without rival for a long time, though both Chrome and Firefox now come with quite a few built in tools for developers as well.
No Script is the third most popular add-on, making the fact that Chrome can't have it even more painful. In fact, none of the top five add-ons, the other two being Personas Plus and Video Download Helper are available for Chrome.