Mozilla Foundation reports 75 million downloads of Mozilla Firefox

Mozilla Foundation reports 75 million downloads of Mozilla Firefox

This is good news for the open source community. Mozilla Foundation has just revealed that as per their own statistics, Mozilla Firefox has seen more than 75 million downloads ever since the first version was launched in November last year. The organization also said that they are expanding their operations in several other directions. Mozilla also said that their open source mail application Mozilla Thunderbird has also seen more than 10 million downloads since the launch of the first final version.

Mozilla also notified that the first pre-release version of their browser application for small screen devices Minimo 007 has also arrived. It comes with tabs, bookmark manager and support for RSS feeds. The staff at the organization has also expanded with around 40 people working as employees at Mozilla Foundation.

Mozilla Foundation’s Chris Hofmann spoke to CNet.com: “We’re beefing up the management on the project. The project is still very healthy. We’re seeing continued corporate interest and have a lot of large organizations that want to do deployments.” The figure of 75 million is somewhat conflicting as it does not record downloads from other sources including Linux installations which comes with Firefox preinstalled. In addition, the organization cannot calculate how many downloads actually are being used in real world scenario.

The number still would give the organization a significant moral boost as they notice a drop in the growth rate of adoption of the Mozilla Firefox browser. The organization is now hoping to come out with a beta test version for use with Windows CE PPC and Windows CE Smartphone of the Minimo 007 mobile browser, which would be competing for a spot on small screen devices with Opera Mobile Browser.