Chicago (IL) – We did watch the Firefox milometer this morning and witnessed, sort of, Mozilla’s 1 billion Firefox downloads milestone. And if we believe Mozilla’s download counter, the pace of Firefox downloads is accelerating, which, however, may not be too surprising.
We have given you a heads up, so don’t say you didn’t know. Firefox crossed the 1 billion download mark earlier today, hitting an important milestone for Mozilla.
We remember that Firefox 1.0 was launched in November of 2004 and hit 100 million downloads less than a year later in October of 2005, going at a stable pace of about 50-60 million downloads every six months.
Following the 200 million download mark that was hit in August of 2006, the counter started running a bit faster: 300 million downloads were announced in February 2007, 400 million in September 2007, and 500 million in February 2008, doubling the pace to about 100 million downloads every six months.
The next 500 million has come even faster, within 17 months. Who would have thought about 1 billion Firefox downloads back in 2004?
Congratulations to the Firefox team, even if we know that these aren’t all unique downloads, but repeated downloads as well. But then we also know that there are many more Firefox downloads through third party download services and the actual download number may be much higher.
