Submitted by Yesterday Firefox’s dowloads reached it’s 75 million mark. That’s 25 million downloads in less then 3 months, well above all previous expectations. Due to its imense popularity and the upcoming release of Firefox 1.5, the team is hoping to reach 100 million downloads in the next 2 months.
I never used Netscape and was a dedicated IE user up until a few months ago, when I finally switched to Firefox. There is no going back now. It doesn’t matter what IE7 will bring, I am staying with FF.
All I want from IE7 is as much standard compliance as possible, for development purposes.
Naturally all statistics are subjective, but how do they count it?
For example, did they count my downloads of FF 1.0, 1.0.1, 1.0.2, 1.0.3, 1.0.4, 1.0.6 as being 6 downloads or 1 download?
And how do they deal with people getting copies from other sources, i.e. when I download my Vector Linux version for my laptop from nluug?
Anyway, it’s a great mark to reach – can’t wait for 1.5!
Are you familiar with the term “Download”? Yes, your 6 downloads counts as 6 downloads. Duh.
If you downloaded each version from the main page, it counts as 6 downloads. If you downloaded it from the update site (or within FF) then it does not count. Of course, many *nix users got it through a package manager, so those downloads wouldn’t count either. In other words, the download counter has almost no meaning.
Ummm…yes it does…It means the number of downloads.
Yes, but “the number of downloads” has no meaning because it doesn’t correspond to the number of people using FF. I guess it’s important to whoever is paying the bill for all of Mozilla’s bandwidth
For fucks sake, give it a break. It mean that Firefox was _downloaded_ 75 million times. Nothing more, nothing less. It gives us an estimate on how popular Firefox is.
IE7 beta will be released August 3rd(?) and Deer Park is going to be released some short time after(?) so it will be nice to see how/if Firefox’s popularity will be affected.
Now to continue with the ussual IE vs FF rant; I, for one hope IE7 is up to the hype. Then that would make FF developers to work even harder. And in the end, we win. By having a better browser aplication.
Do they count source code downloads? If they do, then virtually no Unix/Linux user is counted in that number, because they get theirs from packages or build from source. Or if they do count source code downloads, then the number is inflated up, because source based systems like Gentoo, FreeBSD, etc., are going to count multiple times for each source user.
There are dozens of other questions one could ask as well. In other words, “number of downloads” is a meaningless statistic. We know there’s a correlation to the number of users and/or installations, but we don’t know what that correlation is.
it is an aproximation … obviously … it doesn’t counts also de 50 desktops i installed from one download
They do count because Windows users (unfortunately >90% users) download directly from Mozilla’s servers.
I wish Mozilla Foundation decided to drop Windows support in FF 3.0 and advice Windows users to switch to alternative OS-es. That would be very effective
I wish Mozilla Foundation decided to drop Windows support in FF 3.0 and advice Windows users to switch to alternative OS-es. That would be very effective
Yeah, that would be great. FireFox would just lose all their users that use Windows. You think people would honestly switch their entire OS because of a browser? I’ve seen some stupid comments before, but wow! People could just switch to Opera, it’s just a nice as FireFox.
People have switched platforms (or refused to switch) because of various other applications.
Why not a web browser?
And if >90% of Firefox users run it on Windows, why on earth would the Mozilla Foundation scrap the Windows version in the hopes that a few of those users might switch to another platform? Their interest is promoting their browser, not operating systems
You do realize that Firefox’s original goal was to be the best browser for Windows, right? Only later was it ported to *nix and other systems…
Firefox’s original goal was to be a standalone browser instead of the Mozilla monolith. It had nothing to do with Windows. It wasn’t “ported” to *nix, that’s just stupid. Sorry if that damages your ego, but it’s true.
You must be kidding. Firefox came from mozilla, and mozilla was a cross platform from beginning. Therefore we have XUL and XPCom. Read something before doing such stupid posts.
I’m tired of websites that required either the proprietary Microseft Internet Explorer or the proprietary piece of shit Flash plugin. Fuck Flash and Fuck Microseft.
“Fuck Flash and Fuck Microseft.”
I’m quite tempted to adopt Microseft as my official mis-spelling of Microsoft. Unlike Micro$oft or the other usual suspects, it seems to imply nothing other than “I’m talking about Microsoft and I’m too annoyed to spell”…
I’m tired of websites that required either the proprietary Microseft Internet Explorer or the proprietary piece of shit Flash plugin
Guess what, it’s usually because they need more features than the open standards are willing to give.
Geez, how long did it take for the Mozilla foundation to support something as important as iframes?
Of course IE is lagging seriously behind now, but the fact is it expanded technology at the time of the internet boom. No wonder everyone jumped in to support if and forgot the rest. Now, there’s just a too big installed base of IE-only stuff for it to vanish all of a sudden.
man you are cracked out of your mind
IE innovate? hahaha that is adorable that you beleive that
and name one single website besides windows update that actually requires those hugely innovative features that ms provided that are not avaiable in open standards.
or more likely they did browser detection and lazily blocked everyone else out.
IE innovate? hahaha that is adorable that you beleive that
and name one single website besides windows update that actually requires those hugely innovative features that ms provided that are not avaiable in open standards.
or more likely they did browser detection and lazily blocked everyone else out.
Please, if you’re not willing to learn how to write, at least learn how to read.
IE innovated a lot in 1997-1999. THAT was the time the Internet definitely became a professional medium. THEN IE secured an IE-only install base. FROM THEN, it’s hard to argue for a migration to standards, since the stuff just works as it is, even without CSS2, and >90% of the people can access it.
I know what I speak of, for the very simple reason that I have NEVER used IE as my browser. I had to endure Netscape 4.72 for 3-4 years until Mozilla became usable (about v1.2).
For all those trying it out for the first time, Firefox can import all your Favorites & IE settings automatically.
Firefox-related links:
http://www.mozilla.org
For Firefox 1.0.6 (current release)
Sun’s Java (for Java content)
http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.5.0/download.jsp
click on “Download JRE 5.0 Update 4” on that page
Macromedia Flash Player for Mozilla, Opera, etc
http://www.macromedia.com/shockwave/download/download.cgi?P1_Prod_V…
Adblock (to block ads)
http://adblock.mozdev.org
Be sure to import the “FilterSet.G ad-filters into Adblock from http://www.pierceive.com to stop most pesky ads.
More useful Extensions for Firefox can be found at:
https://addons.mozilla.org
including details of new releases & the most popular and best-rated downloads.
For great support with passionate user community for all things Mozilla, visit:
http://forums.mozillazine.org/index.php
Enjoy Firefox.
Be sure to check out Thunderbird for your email, too. The perfect complement to Firefox!
Past 4 days I’m trying to access pages from mozilla.org site and I’m getting some “unexpected error” I received this error on Firefox 1.0.4 so I upgraded to latest on 1.0.6 but still success! Is everyone facing the same problem? Without pluggins,extension firefox is ZERO! I had to install couple of pluggines from external web sites which could be dangerous! I hope mozilla will fix the problem on their web site. I’m accessing the web site from INDIA.
dude, I doubt any people reading this site is ignorant of firefox.
FF has made progress since it’s inception but it is still plagued with problems. Most notable are that it has closed on IE’s security flaws and took a lead in past few months as most unsecure browser on market.
Memory leaks and resource consumption do not help neither aswell as poor feature set without extensions.
FF is not a bad browser(certanly beats IE when everythig is taken into account), but it is badly overhyped. Opera leads the way on the browser market on all platforms for now.
Just maybe if there wasn’t a new version every week, there wouldn’t be as many downloads. Somehow I don’t see the windows people doing it any other way than downloading it from the front page.
In reality most Windows users will not download updates – or patches anything. They just keep using the same old version that they downloaded first – until things blow up. Then they panic and call someone like me – to fix things up — I fix the problems update things as much as they will pay for – then give them my you need Linux or at the very least stay on top of your system upgrades lecture and leave – where apon they return to being “fat dumb and happy” until things blow up again.
So from my perspective you can just forget about Windows updates counting for many of the 75m downloads because 90% of Windows users don’t do updates.
Been using ie6 but since I couldn’t visit some sites that were linux slanted I got FF for the second time and this time I like and kept it. I like starting out with several homepages inside tabs, the bookmarking of all tabs feature and ofcourse tab browsing. I would like the mainbars to be resizable and ability to click on the google G symbol and be taken to google site.
The addresses should be sorted by frequent usage like in ie6. Those that I use frequently should go to the top those that I don’t go to the bottom. Maybe there is an option for this in FF?
People who are impressed by meaningless large numbers should hire a nerd friend who can explain lies, damn lies, and statistics to them.
“Oh, people can come up with statistics to prove anything, Kent. 14% of people know that.”
-plasmo
That stat is nothing to crow about, in the whole scheme of things.
If they were to crack 10% of browser useage (on average), that would be significant.
It’s an impressive number and all, but in the end it means nothing. People can download multiple times, new versions and so forth.
But of greater issue is the simple matter that 75 million people could have downloaded it, tried it out, and then deleted it. It has no basis for how many people are using it.
I like FF and wish them well, but I can’t fathom why this is news. If they want better statistics they should embedded a little call home bit in the browser which lets the mothership know its being run ever few minutes or so, then they would know how many using it, plus privacy people would love it.
One thing, if you run Linux, Windows whatever you upgrade then you re-download the entire FireFox browser.
So overall this means nothing and it is just hype.
Lastly, it would be nice if they would work on stability, because the current release in Linux is very unstable and crashes all over the place.
Stats are one thing, perhaps true, perhaps “colored” for effect. One thing for sure: in my circle of friends, family, coworkers, and the folks (complete with laptops) that I talk to at Starbucks, nearly everybody is using Firefox.
Results speak for themselves.
“If they want better statistics they should embedded a little call home bit in the browser which lets the mothership know its being run ever few minutes or so, then they would know how many using it, plus privacy people would love it.”
One big prob with that. If firefox did do something like that, might as well call the entire browser spyware which if Im not mistakin, thats why a lot of people use it in the 1st place.
Yea to me the numbers dont mean too much other than how much of their bandwidth has been sucked up. I know there isnt 75million people using FF.
My site is pretty small, get an average of 1021 hits p/day with FF being 2.64%(889 hits total) & IE6 at 75.46%(35,114 hits total). & no I dont use IE, only opera.
It actually does something like that when it checks for a new versions for example.
The thing that it doesn’t do is identify itself, which is the only thing that could possibly allow a somewhat reliable user count.
Are those statistics counted?
One thing, if you run Linux, Windows whatever you upgrade then you re-download the entire FireFox browser.
So overall this means nothing and it is just hype.
Lastly, it would be nice if they would work on stability, because the current release in Linux is very unstable and crashes all over the place.
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Not all users download from mozilla.org. There are plenty of users that use their distrobutions servers for the latest source and or binary. Several people I know either: cvs or apt-get to get FF/Moz.
I agree that downloads vs number users, are two different things. There is no way to tell, it could be higher or lower that the 75 million mark. Once thing is for certain, that is a lot of bandwidth.
> Past 4 days I’m trying to access pages from mozilla.org site and I’m getting some “unexpected error”
http://informationweek.com/story/showArticle.jhtml;jsessionid=Y5QZ0… ?