Firefox Increasingly Popular

The 500 millionth download of the Firefox browser happened last night, evidence of the immense popularity of the little browser that could.

Firefox: On Its Way to Web Domination?

According to the folks at Mozilla, the 500 millionth download of the Firefox browser happened last night. That doesn't, of course, represent a half billion people--I've probably downloaded various versions of the browser thirty times myself, for one computer or another--but it's still a whole lotta downloads, and evidence of the immense popularity of the little browser that could.

I like to do periodic reports of usage of Firefox on PCWorld.com, and these numbers too show Firefox getting more and more popular. The trend for Firefox usage is still trending upwards over time. In fact, January 2008 was the first month during which a third of site visitors--34.36 percent, to be overly exact--used Firefox.

Internet Explorer remains the most-used broser at PCWorld.com, but total usage for IE 7, IE 6, and the dregs of previous versions has fallen below sixty percent. (Back in September 2004, when Firefox was still an obscure beta, just one percent of visitors used it--and around 90 percent of visitors used IE.)

PCWorld.com users are a lot more likely than garden-variety Internet types to use Firefox--here's a report that has overall usage at around 17 percent. (Such data tends to vary a lot from source to source, though--here's another site saying that Firefox usage is around 25 percent.)

I hesitate to make any predictions here, but given that Firefox is no longer an unknown newcomer and its share is still creeping upward, and Microsoft seems to have lost the will to radically upgrade IE, here's a scenario that no longer seems wholly implausible: Firefox may eventually hit 51 percent usage, making it the Web's dominant browser by any definition.
If it happens...well, in that case I'll just pretend I predicted it rather than saying it could happen.