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!"

Comments

Link to get it

[bobbis.u]

How about adding a few more downloads?! Get it here.

Re:Link to get it

[aurelian]

Get a grip, that wasn't FUD. He may have been mistaken, but there was nothing malicious about it.

Re:Link to get it

[Schreckgestalt]

I had to download 3 extensions to make FF work like IE and to get the tabbed browsing working "as advertised", plus hit about:config once.

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!

Re:Link to get it

[aurb]

You can run it with wine.

Re:Link to get it

[Myen]

See bug 121832 on bugzilla.mozilla.org
They did talk to them; Yahoo replied that they want to be able to script Windows Media Player (plugin). Not sure what's happenning now.

It would probably help if you complained to Yahoo as well (hopefully more complaints would help motivate them to fix things).

Re:Link to get it

[dwhitman]

Grandparent: 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).

Parent: Do you have a reference to this intention?

The opening paragraph of the Firefox Development Charter says:

Firefox grew out of the desire to make the best browser for Microsoft Windows. Eventually we began to build on Linux as well, and also Macintosh. Most of our development work is done on Windows, and so that platform naturally tends to lead although we express a desire to work as well as is feasible on every system we can.

How many of these are repeats though?

[andywebz]

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.

Re:How many of these are repeats though?

[Anonymous Coward]

That's only two installs. What did you do with the third download? HOARDING are we?

Re:How many of these are repeats though?

[andywebz]

I described my 2 work installs. I posted on slashdot, so I OBVIOUSLY have a linux box at home.

Re:How many of these are repeats though?

[AmigaAvenger]

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.

Re:Most of that is probably from previous users

[Anonymous Coward]

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!

[Mr. Foogle]

behold the power of wget and a script. Lets you really rack up the ol' hit counter.

Re:Most of that is probably from previous users

[gl4ss]

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)

Re:Most of that is probably from previous users

[AgntOrnge]

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.

Re:Most of that is probably from previous users

[bobbis.u]

Yes, but it does potentially represent that it has been installed on 1 million computers, which is no mean feat in 4 days.

Supported browsers

[Tomasset]

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...

More downloads...

[dutt]

If the amount is over one million at the download counter on their site, then it doesn't meen that it's only one million downloads.

Copies are spread through many other sources so the actual amount of downloads is probably much more than the download counter indicates!

Congrats Firefox!

Re:no prize?

[Xshare]

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. :)

Now how about fixing slashdot?

[feldhaus]

That's 1,000,000 potential people annoyed with Slashdot's dodgy rendering in Firefox.

Surely somebody here could fix it?

Re:Now how about fixing slashdot?

[Anonymous Coward]

You should take a look at slashdot through the W3C markup validator.

Of course, the Slashdot Moderators(tm) don't want you to look at the site through the w3c. That's why you get the 403 forbidden error. However, if you save a page from this site and upload just that html file to w3c, you'll get over a hundred html errors. Try it with this story and you'll see what I'm talking about.

And people wonder why this site doesn't render right on different browsers, sheesh.

Shaggy

p.s. Yes, I know it's easier to bitch and moan than to actually do something about it. But damnit Jim, I'm a bicycle mechanic, not a programmer!

Re:Now how about fixing slashdot?

[Soul-Burn666]

Yes. This bug still apears in 1.0PR.
It comes from the ability to view the site while not all of the data was already downloaded. In case images don't have their size properties, it assumes a default value and forgets to update it when the data appears.

To fix, simply ctrl- and ctrl+ to change font size and it'll fix the layout.

Re:Firefox vs. Windows update

[Jugalator]

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.

Re:How many did you contribute?

[LiquidCoooled]

Best feature for me has to be the highlighted text search (ctrl f).

Its like bringing the search results up from google cache.

My gf has fallen in love with the "Nuke anything" extension, she thinks its cool to make geek stuff go away bit by bit (she sits and wipes out bits of /.). There was a slight pause as I told her it was being deleted it from the entire internet ;)

Re:Most of that is probably from previous users

[asa]

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

Re:It's a conspiracy... ok not really, but sort of

[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

One new user here

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Would be much higher ...

[hemabe]

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.

Re:Is my emerge counted

[asa]

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 for 20,000 users

[cquark]

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.

Early Hype a mistake

[orangeguru]

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

Re:Early Hype a mistake

[Woy]

* many cool plugins and themes haven't been updated for 1.0PR - which would demonstrate the full power of FF

I find that the most glaring error in firefox. The plugins that need updating EVERY SINGLE VERSION of it. I mean, how hard can it be to make the plugins work across versions? Is the interface changing EVERY version? Is the change worth it? Is it getting THAT much better for plugin programmers? What they'll acomplish with this is that they'll burn trought the good will of the plugin programmers before releasing 1.0 final.

Re:What's so "cool" about FireFox?

[asa]

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

Re:awesome

[sharkey]

i got some booty last nite :)

You were a day early, matey. Today be Talk Like a Pirate Day, arrr.