14 DAY TRIAL // Firefox 4 launched exactly one month ago and it seems to be one of the most successful Mozilla launches to date. While it didn't manage to beat the record for the number of downloads in the first day, though it came close, Firefox 4 continued to make headway and has now reached 100 million downloads, according to Mozilla's own counter.
It took Firefox 4 exactly one month to reach this point and it's a rather impressive number. What it means is that many Firefox users have already updated to the latest version and Firefox 4 should be catching up to Firefox 3.6 soon.
Firefox has several hundred million users around the world, but getting them to upgrade to the latest version usually takes several months if not more.
Considering that there are still people running Firefox 3.0 or even Firefox 2.0, it shouldn't be expected to have everyone running Firefox 4.0 any time soon.
This has always been the case, but it wasn't much of a problem since it took anywhere from six months to a year and a half to get a new version out the door.
Mozilla doesn't have that kind of time now, Firefox 5 is coming in two months or so and Firefox 6 a month and a half after that.
Firefox 4 may only be catching up to Firefox 3.6 by the time Firefox 5 comes out. That said, once people start moving to Firefox 5 things will go much smoother since all updates will be silent and automated.
Firefox 4 is the last release done via the traditional model so it may be the last time download stats mean anything for the Mozilla browser. If you haven't been keeping track, Firefox 4 got 7.1 million downloads in the first day, and 15.8 million in two days.