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1 Million Firefoxes in 4 Days

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the more-bytes-than-you-can-count dept.

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!"

9 of 602 comments (clear)

  1. How many of these are repeats though? by andywebz · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.
  2. Re:Most of that is probably from previous users by gl4ss · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.
  3. Supported browsers by Tomasset · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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...

  4. Re:Firefox vs. Windows update by Jugalator · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Behold.. Windows Update Extension for Firefox.

    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? :-P

    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!
  5. Re:Most of that is probably from previous users by asa · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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

  6. One new user here by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

  7. Would be much higher ... by hemabe · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

  8. Re:Is my emerge counted by asa · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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

  9. I downloaded it once for 20,000 users by cquark · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.