Yes, you heard right: Firefox achieved 50,000,000 downloads today. (That’s full downloads since 1.0 was released, and no, it’s not artificially inflated with stats from auto-updates, so leave the conspiracy theories at home.)

Not bad for a spinoff of a spinoff of a company all-but killed off by the world’s most powerful software company, is it?

Congratulations to the “Little Browser That Could” on doing the impossible! Let’s keep this momentum going for 1.1 and 2.0!

In the past week we’ve had major milestones for Opera (massive response to Opera 8), Safari (passing Acid2 and releasing 2.0) and now Firefox. Heck, even IE finally committed to PNG alpha transparency. It’s nice to see the web browser field getting active again.