Firefox Reaches Major Milestone

400 million downloads. It certainly has a nice ring to it. Spread Firefox, Mozilla's official community marketing site, announced on Friday that the browser had reached this impressive number in just under 3 years time. With the public release of Firefox 3.0 just around the corner, the open source browser continues to steadily chip away at the market share of Internet Explorer.

Although the 400 million mark is an achievement Mozilla should be proud of, the number itself can be somewhat misleading. As it turns out, a great number of people download Firefox but never actually use it on a regular basis. The browser's maker is very aware of this high churn factor, and has a plan in place to encourage post-download loyalty to their product.