Firefox is the energizer bunny of web browsers. I just keeps going and going and going.

Asa noticed this and began to wonder if Firefox has supoassed AOL's 22.2 million users.

We don't have solid usage stats and I've been mostly going on the numbers I see from OneStat, TheCounter, and WebSideStory. The only problem there is that while they all generally agree that Gecko is somewhere between 7% and 8% of the market, neither say how large that market is. I suspect that they're assuming a global share of between 500 million and 800 million users (though this is nothing more than a guess.)
If that's anywhere close to reality, then there should be between 35 million and 60 million Gecko users. Assuming that a bit more than half of those are Firefox users (and the rest are legacy Seamonkey users or Netscape users) then there's a very real chance that Firefox usage is very close to or already past the size of AOL's user base.

The adoption rate of Firefox is nothing short of amazing. The IE team at Microsoft has to be busting their butts on the next version of IE.

Expect to see lots more good Firefox stuff coming.

Let's just hope this get patched in a hurry.

Posted by jzawodn at February 07, 2005 12:15 AM

Reader Comments
# Collin said:

Gotta love Opera's response.

"They believe they have correctly implemented IDN, and will not be making any changes."

on February 7, 2005 12:23 AM
# Jeremy Brown said:

I am quite happy with Safari, though I downloaded Firefox and used it a couple times to make purchases on a site that Safari didn't like.

on February 7, 2005 09:55 AM
# DuncanLamb said:

Ok, if you use Firefox, do this:

Count the number of times you have downloaded Firefox. Yes, include, upgrades, do it for each computer you use, at home and work, etc.

Divide 23 million by that number.

It's probably alot closer to the actual number of Firefox users.

on February 7, 2005 12:59 PM
# John Oak said:

@DuncanLamb

Going by that logic, then what about the situation where someone downloads one copy, copies it somewhere on the LAN and then installs it on x number of machines?

on February 7, 2005 03:51 PM
# said:

They're only counting Firefox 1.0 downloads on Spread Firefox, incidentally, so that argument falls through in multiple ways.

on February 8, 2005 05:48 AM
# kix said:

Well yeah I didn't even download firefox it is spreaded on Linux cd's...

on February 27, 2005 09:17 PM
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