Loading ...Firefox reaches 500 million downloads milestone
Today Firefox reached an important milestone on its way to provide an alternative for millions of web users: 500 million downloads* served from Mozilla servers since the initial Firefox 1.0 release back on November 9, 2004.
To celebrate this achievement, Mozilla invites to visit FreeRice.com, a web site that donates 20 grains of rice through the UN World Food Program per each correctly answered question. The goal is to reach 500 million grains of rice today which could feed 25,000 people for one day.
This milestone also reveals an accelerated all-time download rate of about 415,000 per day on average. For recent months the rate is closer to 600,000 downloads per day though.
Here’s a brief timeline of previous Firefox milestones:
Firefox 1.0 is released on November 9, 2004, 1200 days ago.
100 million reached on October 19, 2005, 344 days later.
200 million reached on August 2, 2006, 287 days later.
300 million reached on February 12, 2007, 193 days later
400 million reached on September 7, 2007, 207 days later.
500 million reached today February 22, 2008, 168 days later:
Celebrate now:
* Note: this is the number of downloads through Mozilla servers only. Downloads are not the same as users: a user can install a Firefox download in more than one computer (likely) or download it more than once in the course of several years (even more likely). Firefox users is currently estimated somewhere between 125 and 150 million based on the number of daily update requests.
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February 22nd, 2008 at 10:02 am
500 million… a nice, round figure! ;)
February 22nd, 2008 at 2:02 pm
Wow, this is great news!
But it would be really helpful if they would provide faster and more reliable downloads like Metalink and BitTorrent because they contain multiple mirrors to download from at once and checksums to ensure file integrity.
In addition, expensive bandwidth will be saved for all the generous mirrors out there to provide the next 500 million downloads more easily.
The Metalink Library has a simple command-line interface to generate Metalink and BitTorrent download files in one step:
metalink.py –create-torrent=http://mozilla.org/announce mozilla.mirrors Firefox*.exe
http://code.google.com/p/metalink-library/
February 22nd, 2008 at 2:31 pm
I suppose the name of the new 3 fire fox antivirus checker would be fire bug?
February 23rd, 2008 at 4:02 pm
Whoa, awesome for Firefox. I knew it would happen soon enough. Firefox deserves this!