Slashdot Mirror
1 Million Firefoxes in 4 Days
Dodger73 writes "The Mozilla guys would have liked to reach 1 Million downloads of the Firefox 1.0 pre-release version within ten days of its release. After four days, the download counter now shows 1,006,060 downloads, surpassing the 10^6 mark more than twice as fast as they desired! Congratulations!"
I would seriously doubt that this represents anything like 1 million new users.
Has anyone suggested or in any way implied that they were new users?
Or people who downloaded it to multiple locations such as work and home. The release was also within a day or so of a secuirty announcement so everyone was going to rush to upgrade all of their installs.
Yes, but it does potentially represent that it has been installed on 1 million computers, which is no mean feat in 4 days.
I installed Firefox for the first time yesterday. It worked pretty well! I wish I could uninstall Internet Explorer using a program like XP Lite. My concern is that I would not be able to use Windows Update. If Firefox could run Windows Update I would remove IE permanently.
but for everyone one of you there is probably one like me. 2 downloads, 1 went to work network server and 8 installs at work. the other went to my home file sharing server, and on to 4 machines.
Firefox 0.8 had only 3 million downloads in 4 months and with only 100 hours more than a million downloads of 1.0PR!
The community must spread this kind of initiative to other projects.
Of course a lot of the downloads are upgrades. But you are missing the point of why this was so important - MARKETING.
The release of 1.0 PR garnered a lot of media attention. It appeared on news.google.com's front page. On most tech sites there was a mention. The Wall Street Journal mentioned it twice last week. And then it was going to fall from everyone's attention until 1.0 was released...
Except the MARKETING arm of Mozilla/Firefox decided to have a legitimate goal of 1 million downloads in ten days. This would be the most downloads of the browser ever but it was certainly do able. And then when users pushed it over 1 million much sooner - new press release and new stories. Mind share increased. And all of a sudden, it appears Firefox has huge momentum. And 1.0 is not even out yet. So, does this mean a ton of new users, not necessarily right away. But long term it shows that Mozilla has decided how important MARKETING is and they are ready to use its power to take the program to a whole new level.
That's 1,000,000 potential people annoyed with Slashdot's dodgy rendering in Firefox.
Surely somebody here could fix it?
The important thing is that people are now realizing that they actually have a choice. That's the first step.
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
I really wonder what their counting method is. I imagine they just look in the web server logs and see how many people downloaded the different binary packages and add them together. But what about people like me who emerge -u firefox? Do we get counted?
1 million is great, and like every poster here has said. The count isn't close to accurate. So let us now aim for 2 million!
The GeekNights podcast is going strong. Listen!
1,000,000? Why stop there? I'll bet they'll have another million in a week or two. We're not going to fight IE if we keep setting our sights in the one million range. Let's try to get 10,000,000 new ones in the next year.
:) To make a real dent, we need 10M downloads a month the next year :) We're gonna take back the web. This is only the beginning :)
We're not stopping at all. I think we'll make 2 million by the end of our original 10 day campaign.
And 10M isn't nearly ambitious enough for the next year
This is a pre-release version! Not even a release candidate. This can qualify for a record for *any* computer program -- i don't think even IE can achieve this for a pre-release version dispite the 10 times bigger installed base.
I mean, 1 million downloads in 4 days is really something for any *regular* program.
Here we have a million people willing to download a pre-release version, and track down bugs !!
i would predict that this version will get downloaded by 3 million people.
Can you imagine how many bugs will be reported?
If they manage to deal with them, Firefox v1.0 will be the most stable browser ever made.
Many more millions of "new users" are expected to follow after that.
Washington bullets will simply be known as the "Bulle
IMHO it's a big mistake to make create such a hype on the web for the prerelease version:
* there are still some nasty bugs in there (like some HTML rendering), so they should have waited for a proper 1.0
* many cool plugins and themes haven't been updated for 1.0PR - which would demonstrate the full power of FF
* I can see many avarage Joes downloading 1.0PR and never updating it - jeust because of the buzz
* maybe they should have started the hype, when FF and Thunderbird were ready for 1.0 - so they could offer both in a bundle?
* I still think many major features are either to hidden or need a plugin: mouse gestures should be in by default and 'search in page' is way toooo geeky
* there should be better mechanisms in the software / first startup to make users download their 'usual' plugins (they already have in IE) like Flash, QuickTime and RealPlayer - so that FF will work properly with their usual sites
Get a grip, that wasn't FUD. He may have been mistaken, but there was nothing malicious about it.
Why don't you just tell us what these three extensions were for? I mean hell, how do you think the thing is going to improve if all you say is "it sucks". I really think this version of Firefox is somewhat complete and far superior than IE in its default state.
And what about the tabbed browsing? Everything works like expected to me.
then build a "consumer" download
What a brilliant idea. There should also be a Google for the intelligent and one for the stupid masses. And there should also be a 2.6.x kernel for people who know what thei're doing and one for those who don't. No, this is really a bad idea. There should always be one product, which needs to be compatible with every type of user. Firefox is doing this in a great way!
> get the tabbed browsing working "as advertised"
Your average AOLer doesn't give a crap about Tabbed Browsing, and if they do, the built-in behavior is fine.
Stop projecting your nerdy predilections on "normal users".
How about posting about it here too, either as a comment or a full story feature, if you're not too busy? In particular, strategy uesd for migrating any Javascript-heavy web apps etc, and how your helpdesk coped? Case studies (the larger the better) are vital for pitching Firefox (and OSS more generally) to PHBs.
News flash: Firefox is not IE.
Most people (novice or otherwise) that I've ever introduced Firefox to are very thankful for that fact; I'm sorry your daddy wasn't. If you want something that works just like IE, my advice is stick with IE.