Firefox Ad Boosts DownloadsFirefox Ad Boosts Downloads

Last week's two-page advertisement in the The New York Times paid for by fans of Mozilla's Firefox browser is bringing in more downloads, a Mozilla employee said Wednesday in an online blog.

The ad, which ran in last Thursday's edition of the newspaper, celebrated the November launch of Firefox 1.0, the alternative browser which has been nibbling at Microsoft Internet Explorer's dominance. The advertisement featured the names of the thousands of people who contributed to the Mozilla Foundation's fundraising campaign.

"While it's not always easy to see the direct impact from one particular ad (or any source of popular press), there is no doubt that we're seeing an uptick in the downloads since the ad ran," said Asa Dotzler, a staff member of Mozilla.org. "This weekend we broke 200,000 downloads on both Saturday and Sunday (probably the strongest weekend we've had since the first weekend after the release) and we've seen over half a million downloads for Monday and Tuesday, the strongest showing for a Monday and Tuesday in several weeks."

Mozilla claims that over 12 million copies of Firefox have been downloaded so far.

Recent reports from Web monitoring firms such as the U.S.-based WebSideStory and Amsterdam's OneStat.com have tracked the ongoing success of Firefox, which according to their numbers, now accounts for 4 to 5 percent of the global browser share.