Mozilla Firefox Hits Over 400 Million Browser Downloads

By Amit Chowdhry ● Sep 7, 2007

Mozilla Firefox has just 400 million downloads. Firefox is certainly becoming a browser of choice for many Internet users with a 14.55% market share. And this is while Microsoft Internet Explorer comes bundled with the Windows operating system.

Dave Hyatt and Blake Ross founded Firefox through the Mozilla project, which was sponsored by Netscape. But Blake Ross is now a Facebook employee since the social network bought his company, Parakey.

Netscape and Mozilla’s relationship turned sour because Mozilla wanted to be an open source project where a community of external contributors can help with the development whereas Netscape’s agenda was only to use internal employees.

However, the problem is that the internal employees were controlled by product managers with no clear direction.

Around mid-2001, Netscape had laid off many employees and Mozilla was able to get independence as a non-profit organization.

When Firefox 1.0 shipped, over a million downloads were made on the first day, 10 million downloads happened in 10 days, and then it hit 100 million downloads after about a year.