Whew! The Mozilla Foundation has logged 75,000,000 downloads of Firefox!

Take that number with a grain of salt, of course. At least some of those are manual upgrades (from people who don’t want to wait for the auto-update to kick in), and some are one person downloading it in three places. But it can’t count the copies pre-installed with Fedora Core or Mandriva Linux, or downloaded via P2P—and some of those downloads are immediately pushed across a LAN or stuck on a USB keychain to be installed on a dozen or more computers.

It does show that Firefox continues to hold people’s interest, and the continuing rise in Gecko percentage in web traffic stats shows that, Bill Gates’ comments notwithstanding, people do use it.

(via Mozillazine & Blake Ross)