Internetnews.com reports Firefox Hits 270 Million Users, Without Linux.

The open source Firefox web browser from Mozilla now has some 270 million users. That’s the figure that Mozilla staffer Aza Dotzler is now claiming, and it’s not an easy number to calculate.

Calculating the number of users of any open source application is notoriously hard, but Mozilla has some techniques that can help it arrive at a reasonable estimate. It measures the number of installations pinging the update servers daily, and multiplies that by three to reach its guess.

But the system doesn’t count Linux users of Firefox. Author Sean Michael Kerner writes:

If we take Fedora’s number of users to be 13 million, Ubuntu Linux’s to be another 8 million, then roll in Debian, SUSE, Mandriva and Gentoo users, I don’t think it would be unfair to say that Firefox easily has over 100 million active daily users and nearly 300 million users total (but that’s my own calcuation).

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 13th, 2009 at 7:59 am and is filed under Free Culture, GNU/Linux, Open Source. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.