It was designed by Microsoft for the Microsoft Office suite. In total, would have served various versions of ICQ over 500 million times over the years.Skype for Business is an enterprise software that offers instant messaging, audio calling, and voice conferencing capabilities. Amazingly, ICQ Pro 2003b, not release until November 2002, has logged another 255 million downloads, according to the counter.Īt the end of 2003, ICQ had over 160 million users, many of which would download the latest version when it became available. Within two years, that figure had doubled to 200 million and in July 2002, ICQ was inducted into 's Hall of Fame. In June 2000, ICQ downloads from went past the 100 million mark, the first program to do so. The current v5.04 has clocked up 88 million downloads, reflecting ICQ waning dominance of the Instant Message market it invented some 8 years ago there are now dozens of IM clients. The top slot is occupied by ICQ, which has been available since 1997. However, with a bit of digging, we found Ad-Aware, in 7th place, has been downloaded at least 142 million times WinZIP 9.0 at least 146 million times. Napster came, went and was reborn but it isn't hard to see why these specific programs make up the Top 10 most popular downloaded.Įxact figures are hard to calculate, since most of the programs are listed separately by version, and only the current versions are available for download. Opened way back in 1996, has grown from just a few thousand shareware programs to becoming one of the largest online distribution sites in the world for game demos, software and more recently, legal MP3 downloads.ICQWinampNapsterFirefoxWinZIPiTunesAd-awareSkypeRealPlayerAdobe Acrobat ReaderLooking at the list, I would bet many of you would have most of these currently installed on your PC at home. CNET, celebrating its 10th birthday this year, have announced the Top 10 downloads of the past 10 years.

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