General marketing

500,000,000 downloads served!

By DR ⋅ February 21, 2008 ⋅  Print This Post ⋅ Post a comment

Today the Mozilla Firefox dashboard odometer for downloads finally ticked past the 500 million mark. This is a mind-boggling number for a product that didn’t exist just a few years ago.  When you use Firefox, you’re not only using a superior browser built by a passionate open-source community, but you’re also indirectly giving your thumbs-up to the larger Mozilla mission to preserve choice and innovation on the Internet.

In honor of the 500 million download mark, we’re encouraging folks to help raise 500 million grains of rice in one day to help feed the world’s hungry. Head on over to freerice.com, an innovative website that partners with the United Nations World Food Program to help directly feed 25,000 people for one day.  And help your vocabulary at the same time.

There have been a number of big round-number milestones set over the past few weeks, including 150 million active users of Firefox based on the calculations illustrated in this blog post, and 600 million add-on downloads. With Firefox 3 just around the corner, it’ll be great to see Firefox and Mozilla milestone usage numbers continue to pass thresholds with a lot of zeros attached.