As we approach the official release of Firefox 3, I thought it’d be an interesting thought exercise to start considering what life will look like shortly after that special day.  In other words, where will the Mozilla community see itself one month after launch, e.g., what will the adoption picture look like?

One approach would be to devise a statistical model to predict the future of Firefox 3.  Another, more intuitive approach is to simply layout the events surrounding the launch of Fx2 (October ’06) and let the readers of blog of metrics take some educated guesses.  In the charts below, Firefox 1.5 is the blue line and Firefox 2 is the red line.

Here’s my own fuzzy match… In total, we saw about 22 million cumulative downloads of Fx2 in its first month after release.  That number translated to about 8 million active daily users one month later.  The Mozilla community is now more than twice as large as it was back then (e.g., in terms of # of users), so perhaps we can estimate that we could see 50 million cumulative downloads of Fx3 in its first month after launch, and that this number could translate to about 20 million daily active users of Fx3 within that first month.

Your thoughts?