Microsoft: Firefox's billion claim is 'interesting math'

A billion downloads, not a billion users. If there are only 200 million users and they kept up with 1 point release in 5 then you'd already have a billion downloads.

I went to Mozilla presentations at the last FISL (Forum Internacional de Software Livre / Free Software International Forum) here in Brazil. They explained clearly that one billion downloads don't mean one billion users. And, honestly, I don't see nothing wrong in this kind of marketing.<p>Even though the download counter isn't a reliable source for the exact number of users, it's still reasonable to estimate a software's growth based on the growth in number of downloads between versions. I can't think of a better, marketable way to promote Firefox based on it's growth.

In other news, Microsoft considers addition 'interesting'.

Classic issue of "how do you measure the penetration of open source". I've been installing Firefox as part of my distribution's packaging system for the last few releases. Since this is a download from a distro mirror, Firefox can't really include these statistics, but merely estimate. I'm not sure this qualifies as "interesting math".<p>On the other hand, the only place to legitimately get Internet Explorer is from Microsoft, so it's easy for Microsoft to count.

"If you're satisfied with what you're doing and you're not particularly curious about new technology and don't really care, upgrading sounds like a hassle..."<p>That's why developers should make it worth the hassle by simply not supporting them. Twitter is a good example of a way to do it. At least with the old design their rounded corners didn't show up in IE and only showed in firefox, safari, and maybe Chrome.