The folks at Spread Firefox started a campaign to raise enough money to get a full-page advertisement in the New York Times nation-wide. Users could contibute $30 to get their name in the ad or $10 for students. The Spread Firefox team hoped to get 2,500 donations in 10 days. They blew way past their original expectations when the donation count blasted past their 2,500 goal in only 17 hours. At the time of writing this, the count is at 3,501. Assuming an average of $20 per donation (which is a guess, but the average is above $10), that's $70,000 or more raised in less than a day! Good job, Spread Firefox team.

My worry now is whether or not they can fit all of those names on the ad and still have room for the actual advertisement. Sure, a few thousand names isn't a problem, but there are still nine days left in this campaign. Someone suggested that the Spread Firefox team buys a second page, since it looks like they'll easily be able to afford it.

And here I thought this campaign would fall short like the last couple did.

The Firefox 1.0 Pre-release download count is currently five and a half million, a record number of downloads beating all Mozilla browsers in history, including Netscape. And Firefox isn't even 1.0 final yet! Firefox 1.0 final should come out sometime in November, after RC 1 and potentially an RC 2.