14 DAY TRIAL // Add-ons have always been one of Firefox's major selling points and other browser makers have copied the idea with great success as well. Now, Mozilla has finally released exact numbers indicating just how popular add-ons are with Firefox, specifically Firefox 4 users.
Thanks to the data now available, Mozilla revealed that some 85 percent of Firefox users have at least one add-on installed and the average user has 5 add-ons.
"The revamped Add-ons Manager in Firefox 4 provides a rich experience for add-on discovery and management, and to power that service Mozilla receives aggregate data on add-on usage," Mozilla explained.
"We previously estimated that at least a third of Firefox users had chosen to install an add-on, but knew the number was higher than that," it added.
"We’re very excited to report that 85% of Firefox 4 users have chosen to install an add-on — that’s more than 60 million users every day! This number doesn’t include Personas, and even excludes popular add-ons bundled with other software that the user hasn’t actively agreed to install," it announced.
With Firefox 4, Mozilla introduced a way of actually tracking add-on use and the numbers were surprising even for the group.
The majority of users have add-ons that they've installed themselves from the add-on repository. Most people have one or two add-ons installed, but there are quite a few with more, an average user has five Firefox add-ons. Every day, 580 million add-ons are used by the over 80 million daily users.
The popularity raises once again the question of compatibility. With Firefox 5 now out and the new rapid release cycle in full swing, one important issue is how will add-on makers keep up.
Mozilla introduced an automatic compatibility update program, but some add-ons will still have to updated manually when a new major version comes out, every six weeks.
