Some Twitter postings just demand you read them two or three times to take in what is being said in 140 characters. One such posting was made today by Mozilla CEO John Lilly which simply said: "Firefox user growth has been amazing last 8 weeks or so. +30M or so unique monthlies"
That's worth repeating, 30 million new users for Firefox in an 8 week period. Wow!
Tristan Nitot, President of Mozilla Europe, confirmed the figures when speaking to ZDNet in the UK. Nitot explains that it can calculate the number of users per month by multiplying the active daily users by a factor of three to allow for those days when they are not actually browsing the web. In confirming that Mozilla has seen a "significant increase" in Firefox user numbers, Nitot said "Firefox checks for new versions every 24 hours, when it's running, and when it checks, it pings the Mozilla server. We count the number of pings."
The figures collected show that Firefox now has some 330 million monthly users, and increase over the last eight weeks of some 10 million daily users on average. Although the numbers look good for Mozilla, and the latest global market share statistics suggest it is up around 3% from this time last year, it only has 23.75% of that world share. Microsoft, on the other hand, is in decline with a loss of 5% share during the same period, but crucially Internet Explorer still commands an impressive 65% of the market. That share does vary from country to country though, and Firefox rules the roost in 17 European countries for example.