450 Million People Use Mozilla Firefox

Sites include mozilla.org . Published on October 4th, 2012. Written by Anthony West.

Firefox turned 10 recently and although the celebrations have been low key, lovers of the world’s third most popular browser have been keen to say “thanks to everybody that made it possible.”

That level of gratitude is well deserved too; Firefox first launched in officially under the moniker on September 23, 2002. By February 21, 2008 there were an estimated 500 million downloads of the popular browser. At this time Microsoft’s bundled Internet Explorer was still the biggest game in town but Firefox was still gaining traction among users who wanted to ‘do a bit more’ with their browser.

The release of Firefox 3.0 in June of 2008 was so well received that it set a record for the most downloads by a software program in a 24-hour span. Since then many iterations have come and go for the popular browser and users have come and gone too. In the latter years complaints were made that Firefox was becoming slow and tedious to use; it also saw competition from Google Chrome, the browser which has now supplanted Internet Explorer as the most popular.

But Firefox is still hanging strong and thanks to loyal users (like yours truly) it has settled into a steady user base of 450 million. I keep my installation light and run it with essential add-ons only, but users looking for a bit of individuality as they browse the web can do no better than Firefox. Of course, I say that because I have a bias, but at 450 million strong, I doubt I’d need to search hard to find agreement.

So, happy birthday Firefox!

Are you a Firefox user? Share your thoughts on the 10 year celebration below.