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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!"
True 1 million is 1 million, but I for one downloaded it at home, and twice at work. Once for the windows box, and once for the linux box.
Saying "I'll probably get modded down for this", is a magnet for my -1 mod token. I hate to disappoint.
yes, but so what?
it's still more than with the previous releases, meaning that it has gotten quite a few new users since that.
(ok, the release having magical 1.0 number in it might have something to do with it too)
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
Well I think they deserve the attention. About a week ago I wined about things I thought Firefox and Thunderbird could not do, but I switched and I must say it's far better than I expected. This is a great browser. I especially like the way almost everything is configurable. I think I'll stick to this for a long time to come.
-- Cheers!
I just hope this leads web-developers to eventually test and validate their pages with something else than IE.
I am always so annoyed with the "Your browser is not supported" mesage...
Okay, I probably downloaded it more times than was really necessary, but they were all for different computers. Two for Win98, one for Win95, and one for MacOS X.
Something I don't think has been promoted enough is that Firefox works brilliantly on older computers. I've got an old Win95 machine that I use for when I need to use Microsoft Office (OpenOffice.org is great, but sometimes I need the real MS thing), and was trying to update the IE 4 that it's currently stuck with. Is it possible? I've no idea. I was bounced around various Microsoft download pages, unable to find something that suited Windows 95 - all the system requirements for newer versions of IE given were at least Win98...
Contrast this with Firefox. Visit the Mozilla site, and it guesses which version of Firefox you should need from the User-Agent string of your existing browser. Big link on front page, click on it to download, and minutes later you're in a new browser.
There are many, many older computers around, and before not it was too easy to get stuck with an out-of-date browser. There were alternatives, but Firefox has become the easiest of the lot - it's incredibly simple to upgrade to something secure and modern. It's brilliant!
Tedious Bloggy Stuff - hooray?
Behold.. Windows Update Extension for Firefox.
:-P
If I understand the comments correctly, IE is still required to be fully installed. All it does is to add a menu item for "Windows Update" that runs IE?
What would be nice is a special program that grabs stuff from WU. I know the WU client does, but only the critical security updates.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
Most of the people who suddenly downloaded the update were probably already using a prior version of Firefox. I would seriously doubt that this represents anything like 1 million new users.
Based on my reading of the referrer stats, a significant portion of those downloading Firefox 1.0 PR were using IE to perform that download.
--Asa
I'm probably way behind the Slashdot curve here, but I finally switched over to Mozilla a few months ago after IE started to routinely crash, even after updates and a new firewall/anti-virus. I didn't like Mozilla all that much (it felt a bit clunky), but it worked and was reasonably fast so I stuck with it.
I just got the new release of Firefox a few days ago after a friend recommended it, and I think I have just found my new favorite browser. It has the same streamlined look that I had customized on my old IE setup, but without the MS junk and frequent crashes. Its very fast too, and tabs seem like a great feature (I used to just open everything in a new window before Mozilla.)
I'm basically stuck with a crappy operating system because of gaming and office fonts, but its nice to know that I'm not stuck with IE if I want a fast streamlined browser.
The 1 million downloads are only from english-speaking people. The german version for example is not translated yet. I guess that a few 100,000 users alone in germany, austria and swiss would download the final version.
So the counter would be much higher, if other languages were finished.
Still, keep in mind that Firefox was originally meant to be a Windows program (but it doesn't hurt to be available on multiple platforms though, which I'm definitely in support of).
Do you have a reference to this intention? One would think that Firefox had the intention of being a cross-platform browser like Mozilla before it.
Linux on desktop was a much less credible beast at the time of first phoenix release, though...
Save your wrists today - switch to Dvorak
Kevin Gerich (who, along with Stephen Horlander created the default theme for Firefox) has done some really nice Firefox replacement widgets at his weblog- check them out and install them, they are very nice.
But what about people like me who emerge -u firefox? Do we get counted?
:-)
Unfortunately not. We miss a lot of downloads. Right now we're just looking at our primary FTP mirrors. We're not taking into account all of the not Mozilla FTP mirror download locations or mechanisms.
If you have suggestions about how to get a more inclusive count, please let me know.
The good news is that this is probably a conservative estimate and our real number of 1.0PR downloads are probably higher than what we're reporting.
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!
See SpreadFirefox.com where we're already looking for that second million
--Asa
I downloaded it once and installed it on replicated NFS servers for a Fortune 100 company with over 20,000 UNIX/Linux users. The Fedora, SUSE, and Debian maintainers download it once each for a total of millions of users. It takes a lot of multiple-downloaders like you to equal a few people like me and them, so I wouldn't assume that there's fewer than one million users. There might be quite a few more than a million from those million downloads.
You can semi-permanently wipe away the irrelevant distracting bits of Slashdot easily by checking the 'light' menu box in user config, and then right clicking to block graphics from images.slashdot.org. That, and blocking images from a few ad servers, and Slashdot returns to being content-rich and eyespam free.
"What's the frequency Kenneth?"
I partly agree with you, but don't be so harsh, I have several comments on your arguments:
:)
:)
:)
* First, it simply works [tm] for most users and most sites, so, yes there are still bugs on HTML rendering and it haunting them down will be long story, but as I said - it works for most users.
* I guess lot of those users won't chase cool plugins as long as after month or two of casual browsing - or maybe won't look after plugins at all. So this stuff is for advanced users who already know that they should wait.
* This (t.i. third) point is the most I would agree with - but hey, it's a common problem and it is not only with Firefox.
* Hmmm, smart thought, but I think marketing should start when it should start - it must be slightly before the release of original product. See, Microsoft hypes about Longhorng veeeeeery eaaaarly
* Of coarse lot of things could be improved, but hey, let's leave it to the next versions
* I really LOVE the new way of handling Flash plugins - just click on the embeded object with text 'Download the plugin', opens the wizard, several 'Next' and vola - I got working Flash. It is really MUCH better than previous way of handling things.
So, it is not so bad - it is marketing and I really happy to see that it works - even for open source.
user@ubuntubox:~$ stfu This server is going down for shutdown NOW!
I am kind of puzzled by why Mozilla FireFox is hip. As a user of Mozilla
Firefox doesn't look and feel like Netscape, circa 1997.
There's a reason why I stopped using Netscape, I don't want to go back...
I think that sums it up.
You can't take the sky from me...
I've got to say, that although I'm generally opposed to being given someone elses defaults, I think the "consumer" idea has some merit. Maybe some functionality/extentions by default would be a good thing. The geeks don't have to have it, they could get the others. Obviously the list would vary, but your usual windows IE guy tends to use the defaults so picking a few common (i.e. google bar, gestures) and going with them as "Flagship" extensions, maybe some themes, that way they can try a few before having to hunt through the extention libray (not for newbies necesarily)
Obviously an overhead to manage the package, but nothing major. I don't think that the guy was totaly out of line.
He was however silly to not post his issues, so people could comment and the Moz release team could have some constructive critique.