Firefox Reaches 75 Million Downloads

Other milestones are close to be reached aswell, as Mozilla's open-source mail client ThunderBird is nearing on its 10 millionth download, and Minimo, the browser for small devices had its first prerelease version with tabs, RSS support and a bookmark manager. The Mozilla staff itself has quadrupled during the past six months, to 40 employees.

Mozilla on Tuesday marked the 75 millionth download of Firefox. It's unsure, though, how many users are actually using Firefox as their web browser; The counter counts multiple downloads of different versions and doesn't count Mozilla's automatic updates or copies from single downloads distributed through organizations by technology managers.

The milestone provides at least a psychological boost to the foundation's volunteers and staffers, who have watched growth rates slip this year amid a string of security problems.

"We're beefing up the management on the project," said Chris Hofmann, whose title at Mozilla is in flux since the foundation hired another director of engineering. "The project is still very healthy. We're seeing continued corporate interest and have a lot of large organizations that want to do deployments."

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