Filesharing site The Pirate Bay has clocked up more than 1m downloads of its PirateBrowser web browser in the two months since it launched in mid-August.

The desktop application was released as a response to the growing number of ISPs blocking access to The Pirate Bay and other filesharing site, although it was also pitched as an anti-censorship tool.

The 1m milestone was revealed by TorrentFreak, which notes that although The Pirate Bay hasn't said how many of those people are actively using PirateBrowser, it's currently accounting for 0.5% of the site's visitors.

"I guess that a lot of people want to see the websites their governments and courts are trying to hide from them," one of The Pirate Bay's admins tells TorrentFreak, which in the absence of official stats, estimates that the browser has "hundreds of thousands" of active users.

PirateBrowser is based on the FireFox Portable Edition web browser, adding Tor client Vidalia to anonymise data connections and the FoxyProxy proxy-management plug-in. When it launched, The Pirate Bay described it as "a simple one-click browser that circumvents censorship and blockades and makes the site instantly available and accessible".

The Pirate Bay is blocked by ISPs in an increasing number of countries, including the UK, where Sky, Virgin Media, TalkTalk, O2 and Everything Everywhere were ordered by the high court to stop their customers accessing it in April 2012, after a case brought by music industry body the BPI.

PirateBrowser may not be the most popular tool used to get around such blocks and visit The Pirate Bay, however. In May this year, the site claimed that 8% of its page views were already coming through its dedicated proxy IP-address.