Popular browser Firefox has been having a steady increase in add-on downloads since 2007, and has recently finally crossed the 3 billion 'add-ons downloaded' mark, Mozilla announced. According to a post on the Mozilla blog, “That’s almost half of the world’s population and more than the number of people on the Internet today.”
Add-ons were introduced by Mozilla to the web in 2004 with the Firefox Addon-ons Gallery, and to phones in 2009. More than 85 percent of Firefox users have at least one add-on installed, and on average, a user has five add-ons installed.
Some of the most popular add-ons for Firefox include AdBlock Plus, Firebug, NoScript, Personas Plus and Video DownloadHelper, among others. The most popular categories for add-ons include privacy and security, search tools, bookmarks and themes.
According to the blog post, there are more than 150,000 user-created collections of add-ons to choose from, some of which are Family Organizer, Traveler’s Pack, Sports Fanatic, The Paranoid Kit, Web Developer’s Toolbox and Online Shopping.
The blog post goes on to thank users of the browser, “This amazing milestone was made possible by the hundreds of millions of Firefox users and more than 25,000 Firefox Add-ons developers around the globe.” Mozilla has made an infographic about this achievement as a way to thank users.
According to earlier reports, the Firefox blog has recently announced the release of a new version of beta for Firefox 15. One of the main purposes of the new version of the popular web browser is fixing memory leaks, both for the browser and its add-ons. The other big addition to the beta of the new version of Firefox is the addition of support of the Opus audio format. The format can be played directly in Firefox 15 and offers better compression than formats such as MP3, OGG and AAC. It is also supposed to be good for both music and speech, can dynamically adjust bitrate, audio bandwidth and coding delay, and supports both interactive and pre-recorded applications. The beta was released less than a month after the release of Firefox 14.
Mozilla has also recently announced that Firefox 16 will have support for web apps in its versions for Windows, Mac and Linux. This indicates that when the company’s Marketplace is released, which could be Q4 of 2012, users will be able to run web-based applications from any of their devices. It is also interesting to note that Firefox OS is coming next year, and this entire bundle is part of Mozilla’s Kilimanjaro project, with great syncing features at the core.
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