Firefox reaches 400 million downloads

It is nice to see one of my favorite web browser logging 100s of millions of downloads. When I think about it, I do not even remember the last time I used Internet Explorer. Then again it has been quite a while since I have logged in to Windows too in my dual booting machine.

So a couple of weeks back, Firefox passed the corner stone of being downloaded a whooping 400 million times as tracked by the Spread Firefox website. While the number might be challenged by critics because they don't say if the data is for unique downloads or if it counts all repeat downloads too (Most probably the latter is true). For example, I myself have downloaded Firefox a total of 7 times in the past 6 months.

Fig:Firefox download trends since the past couple of years

I feel happy that this Open Source web browser is gaining more and more patrons as days go by. But it has a long way to go if it needs to challenge the might of Microsoft's Internet Explorer. This is because even now, IE is the dominant web browser for the simple reason that it is installed by default on all Windows machines and it is used by a majority of users. While Firefox's percentage is gradually increasing, it still lags behind IE.

As an example, the graph below highlights the browser usage trends of visitors to this blog. I was really surprised that only just over 25 percent of the visitors to this blog use Firefox as their web browser. And a dominant 66 percent of visitors still use IE.

Fig: Web browser used by visitors to this blog.

But I may add that the percentage of Firefox users is gradually increasing as days go by. And one can definitely dream of a day when Firefox will grab the majority user share of the Web browser. Kudos to the Firefox team for giving us this wonderful web browser.