Firefox hits 270 million users, without Linux

May 06, 2009, 03:01 (0 Talkback[s])
(Other stories by Sean Michael Kerner)

"How do you count users for an open source application that does not require registrations? Downloads aren't accurate, since downloads include the same users that could have updated and/or downloaded revisions.

"What Mozilla does is they use their Application Update Service (AUS) -- the service whereby Firefox automatically calls home once a day looking for updates as a method. The number of users that hit AUS on a daily basis are called the Active Daily Users. Dotzler notes that there are 90 million active daily users. As part of a mathematical computation, Mozilla multiplies the number of daily users by 3 (hence the 270 million) to try and gauge how many total users they have -- since not all user are active every day (or so the theorem goes)."

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