Dear Firefox contributors,
They said browsers were dead. They said open source would never penetrate the mainstream. But you've never cared much for rules, have you? And now we're blazing a trail to 50 million downloads worldwide. As we turn open source into a household word and reassert the supremacy of simplicity, we are making waves—and starting fires.
We've spent long nights in a tiny conference room here in Mountain View trying to figure out how to celebrate this momentous occasion. Should we lower Mitchell, our fearless president, into an erupting volcano? Send her backpacking through the Alps? In the end, we decided we'd rather celebrate by rewarding those who got us here. And that's you.
We have a handful of unique prizes that you won't find anywhere else, and we're asking you to do one simple thing to claim one: impress us. As we drive toward 50 million downloads, do something so cool, so unusual and so spectacular to spread Firefox that we can't help but scurry around the Mozilla Foundation to tell every one. Send a photo of your feat to fifty@spreadfirefox.com.
So what impresses us? Maybe it's convincing your mayor to declare a Firefox holiday (take a picture of the declaration). Or going to the prom dressed as a Firefox (take a picture of your date slapping you). We'll keep a running log of the prize winners and their stories below. The sky's the limit, but the clock's ticking.
Thanks,
Blake and Asa
The SpreadFirefox team Blake and AsaThe SpreadFirefox team
P.S. As soon as we turn 50, we'll be giving away the biggest prize of all to a special Spread Firefox affiliate, and it has nothing to do with impressing us. Come see us on the big day to find out more.
Mozilla Firefox, the Gecko-based open source browser, has now been downloaded over fifty million times from the official download sites and mirrors.

The fifty millionth download itself came at 8:58am PST on April 29. The number excludes upgrades. A real time counter is available at http://www.spreadfirefox.com/fifty.html .

The browser was first released to the public as major release 1.0 on November 9, 2004. There have since been three minor security upgrades, with the current version being 1.0.3.

The browser can trace its roots back to the Netscape Navigator of the 1990s. Development of Firefox itself began in 2002, when Dave Hyatt and Blake Ross began writing the new browser using the codebase of the Mozilla Suite as their starting point, which itself was an open-sourced version of Netscape Navigator.

Originally named Phoenix, the browser was renamed Firebird and then Firefox due to a series of trademark issues.