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Firefox News Roundup
Spaceman40 sent in this ZDNet story. PeterPumpkin collects way too many links to Firefox stories: "According to SpreadFirefox.com , there were almost 3 million downloads of Firefox 1.0 in the 5 days since launch, which comes to over 500,000 downloads per day. There are news bites coming out about Firefox everywhere you could possibly imagine. According to a report on MozillaZine, Denmark's largest television channel, TV2, reported on the release of Mozilla Firefox 1.0. PC-WELT, the German equivalent of PC-World, is distributing their own customised version of Firefox to customers." Thomas Hawk writes "Rather than go outside for the past 48 hours, Scott Granneman prefers to burrow in his den and come up with one of the first definitive lists of Firefox links. Good geeking Scott. And way to overcompensate."
I'm interested in the number of installs per download. Because I suspect *that* is a very high number as well.
Because I've downloaded it once, installed it a few times already, and I was away from computers all weekend. Plus users of Debian Sarge, Gentoo, Arch Linux, BSD, and any other version of Linux with a package-management system didn't download from the Mozilla site.
And what about people routing through a proxy. would the server still get a request and be able to count that download? I demand every fact in the world!
Please stop stalking me, bro.
According to ABC Australia, Microsoft doesn't believe people want tabbed browsing. This seems to indicate they're waiting for users to tell them what they want. This is the kind of attitude that will cost them more than any onslaught of viruses and security gaffes. If you're not looking to exceed your customer's expectations, somebody else will come along and do it for you. Of course nobody thought to ask Microsoft for tabbed browsing, if it was obviously needed it wouldn't be an "innovation".
It should be illegal to say that freedom of speech should be limited.
I, for one, got FireFox 1.0 from a torrent. Are they counting the people who got it through torrents when they tell us how many downloads they have had since release? (or at least trying to guess)
I doubt it, which means that the number is likely much higher.
Also, consider that probably at least 50% of the slashdot crowd (conservative estimate) went and got it, I would say that we're a very good portion of those downloads...so is it really all that impressive??? How many average users are really getting it?
you wanna check if there is a datamining spyware? go to C:\...\Mozilla Firefox\searchplugins (most likely C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\searchplugins) and open ebay.src with the notepad see if there is any references to the said datamining spyware. Ah the beauty of open source.
Calm down people, its a religion not an operating system.
This is a dead horse; please find some other issue to dwell on.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
What I'm interested in is:
Out of the people who downloaded FireFox in this "huge" splurge, how many of them were using either Mozilla or a previous version of FireFox?
Because I suspect that is a *very* high number.
It doesn't matter. Firefox is employing viral marketing at its best. The all important fact here is hype can be a self fulfilling prophecy. The more hype they can get about firefox (by widely publicising the massive number of downloads - regardless of whether they are new converts or not), the more media they get discussing the hype about firefox, which in turn gets more media interested...
The reality is that these days the media largely feeds off itself, so if you reach critical mass, the hype and coverage are self propagating. Cheering about massive numbers of downloads (regardless of who they're by - do you think the media bothers to check?!) is a large part of hitting that critical mass. As long as firefox manages to push past the tipping point on media mindshare it'll get wide enough media coverage that a lot of those downloads will start coming from people honestly switching because they want to see what the fuss is about.
Which is to say the massive number of downloads is all about marketing, which as we all know, doesn't have to connect with reality. Who is doing to the downloading doesn't matter (for now). Wait 6 months and then ask that question.
Jedidiah.
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Okay, I'll be the one to say it: Firefox has some problems that I'd like to see fixed. I'm using it as my primary browser now, but I'm careful how I use it.
:(
1) Slow compared to Mozilla - requires the use of the moox optimized builds. I just built myself a new(ish) machine last night, though, so the extra CPU speed may make this a moot point for me, but the 550mHz Pentium III I was using was definitely not an optimal platform for Firefox.
2) Buggy when lots of tabs are opened - more so than Mozilla. I'd say it crashes around 2x-3x more often than Mozilla. Being careful about how many tabs are open minimizes this, but still - annoying.
3) HORRIBLE, HORRIBLE problem shared with Mozilla - the UI is not multithreaded! Ugh. Fucking ridiculous design - I'm fairly sure I saw something in some roadmap somewhere long ago that this would be worked on 'after Moz 1.7/ff 1.0,' but I've not kept up on that. By far the worst problem I face every day with both Moz & FF.
Regarding Mozilla - some of FF's features need to be ported over, ESPECIALLY the extension manager! I mainly had the impetus to get Firefox moox going as I had a bad extension install that totally borked my Moz install, and there's no easy way to remove them from Mozilla, despite all the FAQs I found.
Bad Idea for both: turning off the ability of javascripts to change the status bar text also turns off link previewing - ridiculous; those should be two entirely separate things.
Other than that, the Moz & FF teams have done remarkable work, and I'm looking forward to new versions, and the very painful death of IE.
When bin Laden put out his video during the US election, I had a devil of a time finding out what he had to say. There was plenty of coverage of the fact that he'd released a film, and lots of discussion of how it would or wouldn't affect the outcome of the election, but scarcely anything about the content of the damn thing. Surely if the Big Bad has something to say, it's in the public interest to hear him? I mean, if he really is as important and terrible a threat as we're told.
Censoring the news on political grounds - 'these are the enemy, so we won't give them the publicity' - is deeply dodgy. So we need al-Jazeera, because maybe if we average it out with Fox and dissolve the precipitate in a solution of BBC, we'll maybe have a good idea of what's actually happening in the world.
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
You could pretty much say the same thing about any open source project. Why use OpenOffice when you could buy Office? Why use Kmail when you could buy Outlook? Why use Linux when you could buy Windows?
The answer, for me, is always the same: Freedom has a value to me. The loss of Freedom that Opera represents is much greater than the $30 pittance that they're asking for it. If you want to pay for it, fine - that's your decision. I have a different set of values and you can't judge my actions by your own set.
BTW, Freedom has tangible benefits in this case. I'm presenting a proposal to my boss to write new client-side software in XUL to provide our customers with access to our web application server's backend. I don't know (and frankly don't care) if Opera, MSIE, or any other browser has equivalent technology, since none of them (excluding text browsers) are as cross-platform as Mozilla. There are no license fees at all, and our customers will be able to use our application under MacOS or Linux as easily as Windows. That's not just a happy-fluffy "I'm Free!" feeling - it's the real ability to provide a valuable service to our clients, which gives our company a competitive advantage.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
I've seen this exact same XUL based application on every single slashdot story mentioning Firefox. It was impressive the first time, but then the effect kind of wore off. Are there no other XUL based applications on the internet?
I'm pretty sure there's a finite number of humans on the planet.
The reality is that there is no ultimate and reliable way to measure market share for something like Firefox. I inflate browser-detect logging numbers by using Firefox on several of my machines; but I deflate them by using an extention that reports Firefox as IE for some sites. I inflate download numbers because I've downloaded Firefox at home and at work: but I deflate them because I've since installed it for several friends who were IE users, without an additional download.
And that's just me.
The download count is probably a pretty good estimate, because I'd guess that for everyone who downloads an "extraneous" copy -- reinstalls, web-developer testing, etc. -- there's at least one person who got Firefox from a corporate intranet, proxy, or other uncounted resource.
It's statistically invalid, but if we must pick a metric, it seems the most reasonable choice.
We may not imagine how our lives could be more frustrating and complex—but Congress can. – Cullen Hightower