The last month showed some impressive figures for Mozilla's Firefox, with a continued steady increase in users over time. While they slowly approach a 15% (or 20% depending on where you are) market share, they've recently been able to pass 200 million copies of FireFox downloaded since release. On top of direct downloads from their site, many downloads come from the thousands of websites and people that endorse Firefox and provide referrals to it. As anyone can guess, 200 million downloads is not the same as 200 million users:
Although the 200 million download mark doesn't translate into that number of users – some have downloaded multiple versions, others canceled the download, still others downloaded but don't regularly use Firefox – Mozilla's has acquired about 15 percent of the global usage share in the nearly 21 months since it was released. In the same time span, Microsoft's Internet Explorer saw its share drop from the high 90s to just under 80 percent.
That also doesn't take into consideration the businesses that use Firefox, often installing it on dozens of machines but downloading it only once. Overall, this is encouraging to fans as well as the developers. We all hope that Firefox 2 will not dissapoint.