Firefox has 125 million users a month

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The Firefox web browser is used by 125 million people a month, according to figures released by an executive at Mozilla.

John Lilly, Mozilla's chief operating officer, arrived at the result by analysing statistical data collected through the browser's update service.

As explained on Lilly's blog, Firefox pings the update servers every day to check for patches and new versions, and by counting those pings he says it is possible for Mozilla to make a rough guess at how many instances of the browser are running.

He labels these instances Active Daily Users (ADU), and said that taken as an average over seven days, the number of ADUs has skyrocketed from 23 million in October 2006 to 48 million in November.

"To get from the ADU number to our whole worldwide number of users, measured in terms of uniques in a given month, like most every website does, we multiply ADU by three," Lilly explains in his blog.

"So for a couple of weeks ago, with 42 million ADUs, we compute that we have something in excess of 126 million unique monthly users."

Intriguingly, whether you agree with the maths or not, Lilly said he actually considers the multiplier to be conservative.

"Take our estimate of monthly users (126 million) and divide by the whole number of internet users in the world (Internet World stats puts the current [population] at 1.2 billion) - you end up with about 10.5 per cent, which is lower than most reports of our global traffic share."

In September, Mozilla released statistics showing the browser had been downloaded 400 million times since its launch in 2004.

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