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!"
How about adding a few more downloads?! Get it here.
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.
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?
behold the power of wget and a script. Lets you really rack up the ol' hit counter.
Display some adaptability.
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.
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.
Who said it did?
Just think about the numbers though. It must be already 10x the number of people the whole development team will meet in their entire lives.
Omnis amans amens
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.
I like the new find bar on the bottom of the window... way better than it poping up.
Ambient [Servlet Based Webapp Engine]
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...
Reporter: "Mr. Gate$, what do you think of Firefox?"
Gate$: "I think its a myth. There are foxes and then there are foxes. There is no such thing as a Fire fox. And now if you'd excuse me, there is a Long Horn up my ass, I have to go see someone abt it."
Copies are spread through many other sources so the actual amount of downloads is probably much more than the download counter indicates!
Congrats Firefox!
Things that impressed them the most over their first ~5 mins.
1. Tabbed Browsing
2. Ability to set multiple pages as home pages.
3. Sleek look.
4. Small download size.
I guess the popup blocker didn't make as much of an impact because of 3rd party blockers/etc that they had installed and functional.
Go Firefox!
An Indian-American Hindu committed to non-violent thought/speech/action alarmed by the global explosion of radical Islam
There was, but when the winner saw the "You're the 1 Millionth downloader!!", he closed it thinking it's just an ad. That or firefox blocked it like all the other ones. :)
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.
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?
That's 1,000,000 potential people annoyed with Slashdot's dodgy rendering in Firefox.
Surely somebody here could fix it?
Okay, I admit it. I downloaded 999,942 of those copies. I was stress testing the download mirrors they've passed. They can survive a good slashdotting.
I've already stress tested the websites of Mono, OpenOffice, Debian, Gentoo, Mandrake, Fedora, SuSE, and other open source apps. They all pass too.
You don't honestly think that open source is that popular, do you?
(Okay, sacrasm aside, yes, there are multiple downloads. In your case, you had three downloads for two computers, but I think this is the exception. One download can serve more than one computer and in an office or "sneaker net" setting, that's the most likely outcome)
I can't believe noone mentioned Kevin Karpenske who kindly donated the firefox.com domain to the mozilla guys.
Kudos to Kevin for demonstrating a great deal of kindness in supporting our favourite browser..
groklaw, wired and slashdot. The holy trinity of work based time wasting.
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've been looking at ways to automatically deploy it using MSI files, and switch the default browser to it across the company network.
Even though I limit peoples permissions they still get spyware. When things get bad especially for people who need admin access to their machines for legacy apps, I have to reinstall Windows2k. Not fun.
Wait till we get version 1.2 or something, and people can confidently install it in the corporate.
Then start counting.
"Give orange me give eat orange me eat orange give me eat orange give me you." -Nim Chimpsky
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!
Dean: "Take back your country"
Firefox: "Take back the web"
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
With almost every release of Mozilla based products, we fix security bugs. We announce those security bugs when we release, that's our standard operating procedure. See http://www.mozilla.org/security/ and http://www.mozilla.org/projects/security/known-vul nerabilities.html.
We're very proud of our new Security Bug Bounty program which went into effect well before the Firefox PR shipped. That program helped us identify and fix several more security bugs than might have otherwise been fixed in this release.
The PR was actually release a couple of weeks behind schedule, in part due to our being busy working on fixing a couple of security and privacy issues. We certainly didn't "throw together a preview for the sake of not having to announce it as a fix for major exploits." What actually happened was that we announced the security fixes to the public and to security research firms like Secunia when we shipped PR. They found out about the problem because we shipped and we disclosed the bugs -- our normal process.
You seem to have the misconception that the security issues were about to be disclosed so we rushed a release out. That's just not the case. It was the Mozilla Foundation that made the security disclosures. We do that each time we ship a new release that has security related bug fixes.
--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.
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
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.
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
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.
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
Actually, given the increasing number of broadband users in the USA, the difference in download times for FireFox and Mozilla 1.7.3 is no longer significant.
The difference between 4.5 MB and 11MB is dramatic for the 60 million (49%) US internet users who still don't have broadband.
I'm not sure how a figure like "half" isn't significant. Half of the US still isn't on broadband and for them, Firefox downloading much easier than Mozilla. Firefox is about the size of an MP3. People can relate to downloading something that size.
But Mozilla has a few things that FireFox lacks right now: 1) better page-rendering accuracy and 2) a very good mail and newsgroup reader.
Mozilla and Firefox share the same Gecko rendering engine so I'm not sure where you get the "better page-rendering accuracy" from. Firefox has a powerful companion e-mail application called Thunderbird for anyone who needs a great (not "good") email and newsgroup reader. Thunderbird is to Mozilla email what Firefox is to Mozilla browser.
--Asa
You were a day early, matey. Today be Talk Like a Pirate Day, arrr.
--
"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
Yeah, and MyIE2 supports Super Drag-and-Drop, too! We should go download it and stay with our huge security hole as our main browser! Or not... Firefox isn't just about the Tabbed Browsing. Tabbed Browsing is extremely useful, but what makes Firefox great is that in conjunction with such other features as Find-As-You-Type, the cleaned up interface they offer with 1.0PR (with the Find dialog eliminated and appearing as a strip at the bottom of the window), the extra security (just from not bein IE), the standards compliance, and the plethora of excellent extensions available for it.
One thing - this 'Super Drag and Drop' crap that MyIE2 can do - yeah, Firefox does that, too...
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...
You forgot this part:
and then i woke up.
Saves so much inks when printing directions.
for the last time people, I am "frodo from middle eaRTH", not "middle eaST".
Nice one Kevin.
About FF supposedly being aimed towards Windows, I'm not going to believe that unless you have a credible source to cite.
However, one thing that irks me about the Moz team is how Firefox's default behavior is quite different in Linux and in Windows. In Windows, if you middle-click on the tab bar at the top, the tab closes. In Linux, the middle click by default wants to open a new page with a link from the clipboard which, more often than not, is not a valid URL and generates an annoying error message. To fix this, you just have to go into the about:config, and change the middleclick.openURL (I think..) to 'false'.
Another thing.. In Windows, if you middle click in a page, you can scroll up and down. In Linux, again, you have to enable this in the about:config.
Since FF is supposed to be a multi-platform browser, I really wish they would make the default behavior consistent between platforms. I don't want to have to twiddle in the config to get it working like it's supposed to.
http://cltracker.net -- powerful craigslist multi-city search
Interesting project, although I think building a lean browser from the ground up is the better approach compared to trying to strip the bloat off Mozilla.
:-)
I think that anyone who has ever built a rendering engine capable of displaying even 95% of today's websites would beg to differ with you. Mozilla's Gecko rendering engine is the most capable standards supporting code available. Minimo is an attempt to get that rendering engine leaned down some and running on small devices.
I've spent some time testing Minimo on an iPaq and it rocks. It can handle just about any web page you throw at it, like Mozilla and Firefox, and it fits in your pocket
--Asa
Do the Mozilla folks have any good recommendations on when to use Firefox vs. Mozilla?
t s. html
http://www.mozilla.org/products/choosing-produc
--Asa