Firefox hits 100m downloads

Up, up and away

By John Leyden, 20th October 2005

Customer Success Testimonial: Recovery is Everything

Updated There's reason to crack open the champagne at the Mozilla Foundation today after Firefox browser downloads reached the 100m milestone. Yup it's party time and fans of the open source browser are invited to upload their celebratory snaps here.

There's also a plan to release a Firefox One, a weather balloon capable of carrying a 14lb (6.4kg) payload to 100,000ft (30.5km) in elevation from central San Francisco on Saturday. "Our payload will be a large Firefox banner, CD, and camera to take photos of Firefox at the edge of space¹," according to Spread Firefox.

In a statement, the Mozilla Foundation extended 100m thank yous to Firefox community members for "reigniting innovation on the web". "Firefox's download success is a direct result of the collaborative efforts of thousands of contributors worldwide. Their work developing and fine-tuning the Firefox browser ensures the best Web experience available. Volunteer extension developers further enrich Firefox's capabilities by enabling users to customize and enhance their browser and truly take back the Web," it said.

Since Firefox lacks a proper update function you have to download the software every time you want to update the browser, as reg</em readers point out. Because of this it would be unwise to conclude there are anything approaching 100m Firefox users out there.

The first full version of Firefox was released in early November 2004 and celebrated 50m downloads around six months ago in late April 2005. Now we're up to Firefox 1.5 Beta 2, the second test version of a new version of the browser, due to enjoy a postponed release later this year. ®

¹The Karman Line, which is generally used to denote the edge of space, where the atmosphere becomes negligible for aeronautical purposes, is at around 100km.