Filed under: Internet, Mozilla, Open Source, Browsers
How many Firefox users are there? Mozilla estimates 270 million
Firefox's market share has been climbing steadily in recent months, and Mozilla's browser is fast approaching 25%.So how many Firefox users does that translate to? According to Asa Dotzler, Mozilla's director of community development, the current tally is about 270 million.
Since there's no unique identifier in Firefox, Mozilla can't provide a totally accurate count. How did they arrive at this figure? By counting the number of security checks registered with their servers.
The average number of checks - 90 million - was then multiplied by three to arrive at a ballpark figure. Dotzler states that the number is probably conservative and the actual count could indeed be much higher.
If the current Internet population is about 1.5 billion and Firefox has 22.8% browser share, that works out to roughly 342 million users. Either way, impressive numbers for the open source browser.
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Mike said 1:18PM on 5-05-2009
I love Firefox. what a great product. the addins are awesome. everyone should give it a go!
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Damian said 1:21PM on 5-05-2009
Firefox has a 22.8% browser share of Internet usage, not Internet users. It could very well be that the average Firefox user spends more time on the internet than the average IE user.
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Lee Mathews said 1:27PM on 5-05-2009
Wikipedia: "Usage share, in web browser statistics, is the percentage of visitors to a group of web sites that use a particular browser. For example, when it is said that Internet Explorer has 66% usage share, it means that some version of Internet Explorer is used by 66% of visitors that visit a given set of sites."
Am I confused on this? That sounds like 22% FF visitors to me, not time...
Damian said 1:33PM on 5-05-2009
Lee Mathews: But this is an attempt to try and measure the Internet as a while and identifying unique users isn't particularly doable. A person could be using different computers (work, home etc...), regularly clearing their cookies, on a dynamic IP etc...
Mitch said 9:22PM on 5-05-2009
Dear Damian,
Quit thinking so hard.
Yours Truly,
The Internet
der_tuxman said 1:27PM on 5-05-2009
Because it is the best one, I presume. :)
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Lee Mathews said 1:28PM on 5-05-2009
And yes, slap my knuckles for citing Wikipedia ;)
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Mike said 1:34PM on 5-05-2009
Damian was confused by the time thing because IE takes more time to load. so therefore it gives IE the adv with time. LOL
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Kenn.keeper said 1:52PM on 5-05-2009
I would assume that also these figures are based on the number of times someone had to re-download FF after it froze or crashed and wouldn't work after that, or the amount of time someone spent trying to fix it...
Just an assumption.....
Kenn .....
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Rocketboy said 4:01PM on 5-05-2009
"In previous blog posts, John Lilly has explained that we cannot identify precisely how many users Firefox has because there is nothing uniquely identifying in the Firefox browser and that's something we're not interested in changing just for the sake of better accounting."
Hey wow look! More numbers just fell out of my ass!
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Saint Seminole said 7:41PM on 5-07-2009
Even my MOM has downloaded Firefox after increasing frustration with Internet Explorer. The owner of my company is also considering going with FF because it's free and easy to customize for particular tasks (he's also looking at OpenOffice and other open-source projects in order to save money in the future).
Until either (a) Mozilla quits developing the browser or (b) someone else comes along and blows it out of the water, then Firefox will continue to gain more market share. Although to be fair, we should say "user share," since there's no "market" per se. The word "market" implies that something's for sale. (Both IE and Firefox are free and downloadable).
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be334 said 9:15PM on 5-31-2009
I use Firefox and love it. I had problems at first, it kept crashing. I contact ed my computer people after I uninstalled it and told them what the problem was and they fixed it within a short period of time and told me to reinstall and I did and it works great! I highly recommend it to everyone.
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