Apparently Firefox has been downloaded 75 million times. And with this in mind, it appears that the Mozilla Foundation has every intention of moving forward with some exciting new ideas.

As it marked the 75 millionth download of its Firefox Web browser, the Mozilla Foundation said it was expanding in several directions.

The foundation’s open-source e-mail reader, Thunderbird, is approaching its 10 millionth download. Mozilla’s browser for small devices, Minimo, reached a milestone, as a prerelease version appeared with tabs, a bookmark manager and RSS feeds. The Mozilla staff itself has quadrupled during the past six months, to 40 employees.

“We’re beefing up the management on the project,” said Chris Hofmann, whose title at Mozilla is in flux since the foundation hired another director of engineering. “The project is still very healthy. We’re seeing continued corporate interest and have a lot of large organizations that want to do deployments.” [Read the rest]