Microsoft Skeptical of Firefox's 1 Billion Downloads
It seems Microsoft isn't exactly bowled over by Mozilla's claim of one billion Firefox downloads.
Most of you were pretty pleased to hear that Mozilla had reached one billion downloads. Given that a lot of you use the browser, you were happy to hear you played a small role in something so huge for the company. However, it seems Microsoft isn't exactly convinced of Mozilla's achievement. According to The Guardian, Amy Barzdukas, a general manager at Microsoft in charge of the company's Internet Explorer browser, said that Mozilla's recent milestone announcement made for "interesting math."
"It's an interesting number and I have not seen the math [but] how many internet connected users are there? 1.1 billion, 1.5 billion, something in that area," Barzdukas said.
Mozilla's one billion figure includes every update and all downloads since Firefox's 2004 launch. Do you think Mozilla is correct in its claim? Let us know in the comments below!

So I personally have installed it at least 5 times and 175 times by association. That does not count updates.
But, they didn't think ahead and never started counting. Mozilla's marketing team beat them in that game, just like Apple beat them to the punch with the "I'm a Mac and I'm better than you are PC" tv ads. Now if Microsoft started counting, or just released some numbers that it can at least account for, it would be too late and be like the "I'm a PC" tv ad fiasco.
Firefox should just add how many people actually download the software as an install, not the automatic updates.
Maybe if I didn't have to re-install Windows so much I wouldn't download Firefox as much... Thinking about it I guess we can thank Microsoft for playing such a big part in Firefox' download counts :-)
They are running on their own track, they decided the rules and now some guy comes in and says, on your track you have to follow rules we decide.
No microsoft. It doesn't work like that. They never claimed something that is probably not true. They never claimed unique users. You just want to get in the news and try discrediting them for an achievement they gotten fair and square.
And yes, MS probably has a lot more downloads. But they never made claims and tried to fuse it with their OS, so their downloads is lower anyway (most people get it from the install cd, only updates).
Mozilla and firefox are just busy with a lot of unique downloads on release day and a lot of downloads total. That's the way for them to do marketing. Let them and play your own game MS. You have been doing fine, no need to drag the competition in the dirt. Guess MS is feeling Firefox getting closer and closer and losing the browser war they had total dominance over.
Since switching to Vista I do have to admit I've only had to reinstall three times on four computers so far since its release. Strangely two of those reinstalls were the result of installing OneCare on the systems when they expanded it to work on Vista and it leaving the systems totally fubar, couldn't do anything to restore or repair them at all.