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Firefox Reaches 10 Million Downloads
Samhain138 writes "It seems like Firefox has finally reached 10 million downloads, just a bit over a month after Firefox 1.0 was released. Congratulations!" My favorite extensions (not all of which worked when 1.0 first came out) are all working happily now, too; the latest nightly has been working flawlessly for me all of today.
But the work's not over yet...
Consumers will be the only ones to gain from this. Now either Microsoft attempts to get their act together or everyone (myself included) will just go for Firefox.
Welcome to counter rollover day on slashdot. Please run out to your cars and see if you might reach some important milestone on your odometer, it may be worth a story.
and 5 million of them were aborted due to some network suckage :)
So how soon until they release their New York Times advertisement?
We cannot change the download counter by hitting the refresh button!!!
how something that used to have updates every three to four months now causes people to wet their pants like this: "the latest nightly has been working flawlessly for me all of today."
I mean, don't you all have something serious to occupy your time with? Like Half-Life 2 patches? Or writing the walkthrough?
Or, something?
sig not found
Adblock is simply the best extension. Get rid of flash ads etc. http://adblock.mozdev.org/
I also hope, the firefox/mozilla team does not rest on its laurels, and create new features and innovations which can be used as the basis for the next generation of web applications (the last ones were when there was a competetion of sorts between IE and NS)
but i've had a few complaints... one being it crashes a whole lot more than ie does, two it takes a bit longer to get it to start up for the first time - not a big deal, but a little annoying, and three embedded windows media files won't seem to play at all.
You're nothing; like me.
IE is dead! Netcraft confirmeth!
Several tens of millions.
But even one million is an accomplishment, as most of those peoples use Firefox. Not all SP2 users use IE. Some use Firefox. I know at least half a dozen who I "converted"
I downloaded 8 million of them myself. So the numbers perhaps are slightly misleading.
The Custom Mary
I'm glad Firefox has been getting the attention it deserves (for all the right reasons, to boot). I've been a faithful user since the phoenix days, and still love it. I've been slowly turning family and friends to it, but old habits die hard for many.
Do you all try to get them to use Firefox? How does it work out?
> My favorite extensions what are they?
I don't recall anybody downloading IE
so. your point?
I'd Tell you all my secrets but I lie about my past
Three copies for me, one for each of my systems. Unfortunately still have to use IE at work, but working on that. :(.
Before Firefox, I would routinely, between Ad-Aware and Spybot, be cleaning up 50-100 spyware/adware infections a week between the machines. (This was with IE set to high security.) After switching to Firefox, the highest weekly total (between all the systems) has been five.
Firefox typically opens within a couple seconds of clicking whatever needs to use it. I routinely had IE take half a minute. If I needed any proof that Firefox is a superior, faster, more secure browser, this has certainly been it. I'll never use IE again.
To fight the war on terror, stop being afraid.
Internet Explorer had about 40% marketshare even before it was bundled with Windows 98. Take that Firefox!
And the most useful extension, SessionSaver, still isn't available for 1.0. The old version, if you can still find it, mostly works okay though. A site to grab it from is here. I hear a rumor that there's a SessionSaverPlus in the works which will fully work with 1.0, but I haven't seen any code yet. Any news on this?
How am I supposed to fit a pithy, relevant quote into 120 characters?
In total? Im sure a good portion of those are redownloads. Lost backups, reformats, new versions released. Unless this is only counting the download of Firefox 1.0 What about mirrored downloads though? Im sure there are other places to download it, besides the mozilla website.
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
10 million is great and all, but my non-geek website is still showing 2% of firefox users. And firefox crashed on me today, doing perfectly normal stuff.
I think something big needs to happen - massive hole in IE exposed or something - to get large companies to bother with the conversion on their intranets. Large companies are the ones holding users back, and they should be the main agents for change in the browser market.
Remember kids, that monocultures of each kind are a good base for epidemic diseases.
It doesn't really matter what name the monoculture has it only differs in time left to the apocalypse.
I don't think that's going to phase firefox :) Until you switch to a non-p.o.s. browser I don't think anyone's going to take what you say seriously, Mr Anonymous Coward.
Well Let's See
Win 3.x no IE Mosaic my browser of choice
Win 95 IE standard
Etc, etc, etc.
if I needed IE I could get it off a software CD or a Win * update
but who really went out to "download" IE it self (not update)
I'd Tell you all my secrets but I lie about my past
heh
is how Firefox works with "PDF browser plugin": opening a PFD doc in one tab kills wheel srolling in other tabs... The plugin works seamlessly in Safari otherwise I haven't seen any other problems
Granted that IE is a security nightmare...but Firefox 1.0 with it's extensions and plugins has been a nasty problem on my windows machine. Running it on my windows machine causes a lot of paging and CPU activity- so much so that the machine hangs. It stays slow even after I kill firefox.
I didn't have any of these problems on Linux. I am not sure if it is Firefox or it's extensions or plugins.
Avary landed on Trunk a few days ago, so there's significant improvements in the 1.0+ version which will go on to be developed towards 1.1, though likely less stable and with a whole hoast of new bugs people are already reporting that it's got faster page load times.
:)
Not to mention the best benifit, 1.0+ renders slashdot correctly
The number of users is much much higher, I would say that the number is at least 15million users. I have seen many web sites that offer firefox on there own websites and many people are getting firefox via bittorrent. I fix computers as an after school job and part of my fix for windows is to put firefox on, I do this from a CD I have. Everyone I have suggested firefox to has stuck with it.
Answer: The dog is on fire.
Whoever designed level 61 in Frozen Bubble is a sadistic bastard.
Firefox is not only still increasing in usage, but has been accelerating this entire year.
See their statistics here.
They include the December statistics, and it has already increased more than in the past month, and it's still only 12th of December...
It's interesting to compare to the usage in e.g. January 2004.
Of course, W3Schools is a web site not really representing the Internet population at large, but it is a community that consists of a whole lot of web masters teaching themselves to code for the web we'll see tomorrow. I hope these are signs of what to come and we'll have less incompatible web sites in the future.
2004 has truly been a year the Mozilla Foundation has been doing great, and it will be very interesting to see what will happen in 2005!
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
Then, FireFox will be more attractive than Sweet&Sour Pork to the Chinese hackers. Winter Melon Soup, anyone?
...who got the 10 millionth download?
I've been trying to download it on a crappy dialup connection. Sorry, sorry.
And that's the ony real reason I use it. IE keeps asking me to install it, Firefox just shows an icon. No plug-ins.
Vote Quimby!
No - I don't think that's it. Good try though, thanks.
Sourceforge's Top Downloads eMule, the top project, has 80 million downloads. Gaim, for all its awesomeness, has about 5 million. I'm not farmiliar with how they track these statistics, but I assume that is for all versions over its entire lifetime. As with the FF downloads, this is easily skewed by people downloading it more than once, or from a different source.
AI Roboform is somehow screwing up with Firefox.
Looks like weapons of mass destruction to me
Speaking of firefox. They already have an extension for google suggest Check it out:
1 86
http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?t=182
i see some problems with it but it has potential..
cueland@berkeley.edu
1 on my Linux FC3 laptop.
One on my PC winXP pro
1 on my Suse 9.1 PC..
Would like to switch wHere I work but they fear change. I'll just put it on my workstation and let everybody wonder why my system isn't attack. Wait I'm the Network Admin!!!
Sometimes I forget my power...
__________ Leave me alone I'm compiling a RPG II program on my S/36...Thanks to metamucil I'm a Regular Meta Moderator
I read this in my PC World last week (subscription in mail) and saw several other sites reporting it.
To those mentioning Firefox and AI Roboform, I'm also having problems with it and just went with the one built into Firefox.
This is an in-joke from another Slashdot article. It's funny once you get the context.
AnimeNEXT anime convention
...the latest nightly has been working flawlessly for me all of today.
You picked a great time to use the nightly trunk build. With the 1.0 branch being synced up to the trunk this causes many side effects, not all of them good.
But if you know nothing about software development I suggest visiting here.
Does this look like a help forum?
C'mon. Click.
Although I personally am responsible for about 10 of those downloads - a claim that I'm sure that most slashdotters can share.
I really wish that the Extension Room was more carefully maintained though. As an example, I looked at the RSS extensions recently, and found that 2 out of 3 did not work. One was even version 0.0.1! With extensions that can't install, or even worse, cause problems, it really tarnishes the quality of the work that went into Firefox itself.
If you happen to care that people start using some browser other than IE, there is a simple thing that you can do that will help convince people to switch, stop supporting IE.
All of my friends who want free tech support from me know that if they use IE, they get no sympathy from me.
None of the websites that I develop personally are tested with IE, they get a small message saying "this site has not been tested with Internet Explorer, and may not work as expected. If you want to be sure you are getting the full experience from this site, please download an alternate web browser: http://www.mozilla.org/products/firefox/".
Famous Last Words: "hmm...wikipedia says it's edible"
so what's everyone's favorite extensions? I like adblock, which provides a really effective way to block those annoying flash banners you see everywhere nowadays.
The 50-100 infections the zealot is talking about are most probably cookies. Adaware and Spybot count each cookie as a seperate spyware. Of course, they only look at IE's cookies, not Firefox's.
Does FireFox send information when it is installed, or is it just through the Mozilla website? If the latter, then it wouldn't help for organisations that download a single copy and distribute, or downloads from mirrors (such as the default for Gentoo using emerge).
Thank you thank you for finally giving us this information. I can't tell you how many sleepless nights I've spent wondering exactly how many copies of Firefox mbrewthx has installed, and on what types of systems. Now I can finally get some shut-eye. whew!
Nightly builds are currently suffering from some instability after the recent branch merge (lots of features only lived on the branch until now, and only recently became available on the trunk, like extension/theme manager and find bar). If you're a happy 1.0.0 user, it might be advisable to stick with that for a while until the nightlies stabalize a bit more. A list of important bugs and fixes can be found here
OK, I'm bored and have a spreadsheet to hand, so I've dropped the data into a spreadsheet, generated a graph and added an exponential trendline to Mozilla. It tracks the recorded data quite nicely from January 2002 through to July 2004 at which point the recorded data actually starts to climb increasingly *above* the curve. Assuming that the current momentum is maintained, the trend line shows Mozilla passing 50% of total browser share around July 2006, but taking the post-1.0 surge into account it could be as soon as September 2005!
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
I've been using Fire(bird|fox) since 0.6 and I love it. I couldn't possibly use any other browser. It supports everything that I like. :) I've first tried it on Windows - now that I don't use windows anymore I only use Firefox on Linux. My entire school has also enforced Firefox ONLY. :) Which is awesome! So change is occuring - and hopefully the change will occur more fastly.
I use Opera you racist American pig!
When I first heard about the march to 10 million downloads, I did wonder if we should have set our goals a little higher. So maybe there should be march to 25 million?
I'm not a prophet or a stone-age man,
I'm just a mortal with potential of a super man.
Remember the days of the browser wars when so many people warned that if IE became the dominant browser MS would take over the Internet. Well it did and they didn't.
Other then ASP.Net's smart navigation feature, MS would lose very little if everybody switched to Firefox.
Who cares? IE is free as well, i'm using it right now! no spyware/adware/malware. I've google toolbar as well. Blocks all popups w/o a hitch. Not switching. /rant
I'm always asked to help clean up friends computers, get rid of spyware, adware, etc. What I always do is download Firefox (along with Adblocker) and then go through the whole system and change all of the Firefox icons to IE icons. (I also set them up with a good filter for Adblocker) The real IE shortcut I dump in the trash and delete. I then tell my non-tech friends that "I fixed the internet" so that they won't see ads, won't get popups and will be much more protected against spyware. If I feel someone might actually understand what I did, I tell them. Always, a few days later, I get e-mails, calls, etc. about how great the "Internet" is working and more referrals to fix on other folks PCs. Of course, sadly, IE still lurks behind every open window, so it can't be gotten rid of completely.
Does anyone know where I can get a glibc 2.2 build? Will it even work on systems that weren't released within the last 2 years?
.src.rpms but I'm starting to run into problems. I just wanna get s**t done but I'm going to have to "upgrade" now just because some bum thinks everyone has xft.
As a side note, I find it pretty annoying that I'm getting left behind with my RH 7.3 system. I was getting by ok building
and it's already been uninstalled from my system
Only 20 people made up the 10 million downloads.
But where it really shines is for surfing porn (or so I'm told). None of those dang active-x controls, and it handles the pop-ups better.
don't forget why VHS won over Beta...
One dreadful thought went thru my mind... when Netcraft dies... who will be left to confirm it ? :O
Check this site for some optimized builds: moox.ws I highly recommend downloading them, they make page loading and browsign significantly faster.
At its current trajectory, how long until it passes the 100% mark?
An interesting observation from your link: Every single browser has lost users each month since June 2004. On the other hand, Mozzilla's usage has increased every single month since its birth. They are directly taking users from all other broswers, which is no easy task. This is great news for open source software, as it proves to be a good, viable alternative to closed source software.
I never thought I would switch from integrated IE to another non ms browser. But after using Firefox 50% of the time, I've finally made it my default browser. Without a doubt the active bookmarks are slick, I even update by blog and forums for rss because of Firefox. TB is also great, although support for large IMAP folders needs improvement in my opinion. But I'm downloading now (Asynchronously!!) an old account with more than 18k emails. I love it! Darin
I had to remove this the other day.. it was causing a noticable lag in loading pages. I've gone back to disabling images and using the flashblock extension.
Yes- the world should switch browsers right away!
The guy who submitted the article said that Firefox has been working flawlessly all day!
Time to celebrate!
I use Firefox about 50% of the time, and I think it is just fine. But the original post seemed like a horrible backhanded compliment.
"Dude, your mom isn't nearly as ugly as she used to be!"
No reason to lie.
And by 2007 there will be three people using Firefox for every two computers in the world, By 2008 there will be 14 billion people using Firefox. By 2015 there will be more copies of Firefox in use than protons in the observable universe. :-)
MS has given up on IE. Someone is going to come up with the killer extension to Firefox and then it will gain even more momentum. Tabbed windows was a great start. At first I thought it was a stupid idea, and then I tried it and realized how wrong I was. IE hasn't seen new functionality since, what?, 1996? (Not counting security fixes of course.) Now MS is too concerned with DRM and other ways of cementing their monopoly rather than competing on features, usefulness or other value.
Firefox gets new features every day thanks to extensions... and some of them are really useful.
I love this tool, and hope to see it take off in market share.
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
Don't you mean customers?
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
Open in Tabs. Make a bookmark folder of the websites you want to be open when you sit down and start browsing. When opening that folder the Bookmarks menu, use the last entry -- "Open In Tabs" -- and go get your coffee. When you come back, the browser is ready: All the sites are nicley pre-loaded in tabs.
RSS Feeds. If you haven't tried this yet, do yourself a favour and do so. For those clueless people like me, what you do is click the little RSS button on the bottom right of the browser, which creates a new bookmark folder. Inside that folder, the links to the stories of the day are created automatically for that site.
Yeah, I know, you've been doing this for ever, what's next, Nice2Cats will discover these things called fax machines. But for slow people like me, this is just awesome. Combine this with the adblock extension, and there is no way in hell IE can compete anymore.
Now if only Firesomething would get updated...
All comments are properties and trademarks of the voices in my head. Not like I'm gonna claim them.
I'm guessing it's because there's no official way to switch language packs (though there's an extension), but could anybody confirm this?
Heh, you sure? That "Zing shot" looks like it could be used in the anus.
Get Tabbrowser Extensions. Not only does it give you better tab control (and a bug-free single window mode), but it also saves your sessions!
Given that the author of that comment is a story editor, he probably has spent his entire day web surfing with that browser, reading countless sites loaded with HTML craziness, trying to research the facts of hundreds, nay thousands, of story submissions. So give him a break.
Oh wait, this is slashdot. Never mind.
The Autonomous Cow. Moo.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I can't speak for the GP, but I've found that in most cases, people don't. This may explain the amount of viruses around the internet.
warning: This post is likely to contain gobs of dripping sarcasm. Consume at your own risk.
Internet Explorer was first bundled with Windows 95 (not the original, but all subsequent OEM versions), not 98. Most machines sold with Windows 95 on them after 1996 or so would have had some version of Internet Explorer (probably v3) already installed. It was free (Netscape still cost money unless you pirated a copy of it, or the ISP you signed up to purchased a copy for you), pre-installed on new machines (and most people, as today, would be too lazy to bother getting another browser if they already have one), and was still an unusable pile of trash in any version prior to v5.
Aside from that, Firefox probably has at least as many users now as IE did back then.
The only time I got to W3schools is to look at those stats. Of course, I got there with firefox, like all the firefox lovers who are happy to look at those stats. I wonder if the stats page is a significant portion of their traffic... somehow I don't think IE users visit that page often ;)
I'd like those back please, especially the first. If we're going to have tabs, why not exploit them compeletely?
I don't get it.
Set your IE proxy to 127.0.0.1:1, no proxy for 127.0.0.1. Then even if IE (MSHTML) runs, it won't be able to access anywhere but the local machine. Firefox won't be affected.
Why is replacing IE sooo important to so many of you? I didn't even know there was an IE for Linux? What's that you say, you are really running Windows? Oh.
Ok, if most of you are really running Windows, how many have actually caught a virus through IE? I'm curious because I have been using Windows 10+ hours a day 7 days a week (yes I have no life or wife) since Windows version 2 and I have never had a virus, from IE or anything else. Yes I keep up with patches. Yes I am very diligent about what I download and run. But it seems to me that tech savvy geeks should be able to avoid viruses.
I am just trying to understand why IE viruses are even a concern for most of you - running mostly Linux and being computer savvy and all. Is it the support issues? Because I guarantee the support problems are going to be as bad with a browser that does not render a significant number of web sites and only, "as of last nights build, ran all day without a problem."
Yes, I tried FF, ran it for 2 days and gave up because of all the sites that did not work in it.
Can someone explain to me the compelling reason for the FF religion besides "it's not Microsoft"?
It's a shame I have to post AC because any opposing view will get moderated flaimbait, no matter what.
IMHO I don't think an update or a patch counts as a full download of a new software package.
I still can't get the screen shots of Castle Wolfenstein for the Apple IIe out of my head.
When Longhorn comes out, it will introduce support for Next Generation Secure Computing Base (formerly called Palladium), Microsoft's implementation of Treacherous Computing. Many web sites, starting with those that sell DRM copies of copyrighted works, will begin to offer "value added" content available only to users with Microsoft Trusted Internet Explorer (yes, an oxymoron, but the general public still doesn't know that). As more and more Windows users upgrade to Longhorn, either by installing on top of Windows XP or by buying a new computer and paying the Windows tax, the Treacherous Computing userbase will increase, and Alsee has predicted that more and more web sites will migrate to Treacherous Computing access only.
We have to get people to distrust IE now, before the next Microsoft Windows upgrade cycle.
What planet are you surfing.. wmf play as an extention on wmp (the wimp) or windozer media player. How the heck do you get the impression that your media player has anything to do with your browser. All WMP does is play the file format, it launches just fine with any browser as long as you config it as your default media player! Some extended Wimp files will not play in Winamp so I guess you have it as the default extention. In Firefox the file extention associations are in a strange place OPTIONS/DOWNLOADS /FILE TYPES. Change the media file types to use the windows media player as the default helper application. All things considered this is very simple even for a Windows Luser.
i downloaded a DVD off of suprnova with every Microsoft OS from something like DOS 3 up to Windows 2003 Server- that means I downloaded IE a TON of times.
not to mention the Windows XP SP2 w/ Office 2003 iso I got from suprnova as well. it turns out that I download IE quite a bit. so, but that logic (and based upon piracy numebers) a great deal of people download IE.
Does anyone else have a problem when opening/using/closing Adobe Acrobat with Firefox v1.0? It almost always hangs my browser when I try to close down Acrobat . I did not have the same problem with version 0.9 or earlier.
Anal-retentive is hyphenated,
Obsessive compulsive is not,
wash your hands thirty times with hot water and soap,
check to make sure the alarm clock is set at least three times before you go to bed, but make sure that you get into the bed on the right side, otherwise bad things will happen.
Did I lock the front door? I'm late for work, but it won't matter if I drive by and check again for the fourth time.
Simple, no?
I love the fact that firefox offers live bookmarks but I haven't found many websites that offer the options. Do you know of any new websites offering live bookmarks.
"So you never update your Windows installation?"
Don't be silly of corse I did but It was not to download IE. it was to set everything up for the next set of Virii coming down the pike.
I actually got rid of IE off my new mac first thing and until recently I've been using Linux exclusively for year.
I'd Tell you all my secrets but I lie about my past
http://autoform.mozdev.org/
That can solve your problems for now, somewhat. Give it a runthrough.
"We're breaking out the ramen noodles. . . "
"Really? Is it someone's birthday?"
There is actually more than 10 million, for example, people using Debian. The mainterner(s) downloaded the source code and then millions (or there abouts :) downloaded firefox from the repository. Mozilla is not counting these types of downloads.
More secure? Yes. But there are a few VERY annoying interface anomalies- the most salient is probably all the dialogs that come up asking me this, telling me that... Truth is, I really don't care. I know where I want to go, and I want to get there without having my train of thought constantly interrupted. I feel like I'm being nagged every time I do a little surfing.
Perhaps this shouldn't be the default behavior, but at least let me turn them off. I have to say that this is every bit as annoying as some of the crap that Microsoft has come up with.
SVG!!!
- I don't need to go outside, my CRT tan'll do me just fine.
The infamous 100% cpu usage bug. It has been present at least since 0.9 and occurs frequently and seemingly at random though usually it's when it's "loading" a page. It gets stuck and usually, closing the tab is not enough and i have to restart the browser.
Don't get me wrong, I love my firefox but it's annoying as hell to constantly find out that the reason my computer has been running so slow for the past 5 minutes or the reason this game i launched is giving me 10 fps is because firefox did it again (and again, and again...like the duracell rabbit)
I'm not the only one complaining about this and I 'm still waiting for a fix. (amd64 3200+, 1 gb ram)
(The statistics above are extracted from W3Schools' log-files, but we are also monitoring other sources around the Internet to assure the quality of these figures)
You can see that the users aren't just people who go to W3schools website. It is still higher than most other sites browser stats though and as they also say on this site take it with a grain of salt.I know I have a bad impression of TB.
Perhaps the first rule for promoting Thunderbird should be... Don't Call Thunderbird "TB"!
Laws are for people with no friends.
Warezers d/l it with pirated windowz
"And so the Trekkies were executed in the mannor most befitting virgins - thrown into volcanoes" - Futurama
My MS-Windows 3.1 to MS-Windows 95 upgrade either didn't come with IE at all, or it came with a really crappy version that I never used.
Instead, I used a proprietary browser that Netcom distributed to its customers (called "Netcruiser"??).
I eventually downloaded and installed Netscape Navigator, which also didn't work too wel, then IE 5.something, which worked a lot better.
I was still using it until about couple of years ago.
(At one time, I was actually an MS fan, although not any more.)
I'm still running MS-Windows 95 (dual-booting with Slackware), but am now using Mozilla as my browser (for the next few months, anyway).
Those who sacrifice security to condemn liberty deserve to repeat history or something. - Benjamin Santayana
Or is it just the dl's off the official site?
a faster ,more responsive back button.
"wel" should be "well".
I did use "Preview", dammit!
Those who sacrifice security to condemn liberty deserve to repeat history or something. - Benjamin Santayana
WEll,i've downloaded IE without using MS Update. You were able to go to MS and download IE v5 and V6 when it came out. It was called iesetup.exe and it would download rest of the files. I'm sure if I would of dug around the MS website I would of found the full setup file.
It was when version 6 came out, and not everyone had the requirements to run it.
Be seeing you...
But how many of these are 'unique'? I downloaded Firefox twice, once for windows and once the linux version!
Love FireFox, but I prefer Konq right now. Soon enough you'll be able to use KHTML or Gecko in it anyway...
Treehugger? Treehugger... Treehugger!
Firefox is neat and all, and I'm glad it's taking over on the Windows side, but the form widgets that Firefox uses are horrible and ugly looking. It alwaus throws me off every time I want to switch to Firefox from Safari, those horrible, custom, non-standard form widgets. Call me weird, but that alone would get me to switch.
Currently, IE loads faster than firefox. Visually it displays pages faster. I think the main issue here is common sense when it comes to adware, spyware, popups. I use IE when I use windows, and I never get adware or spyware. I'm tired of firefox fanboys constantly saying firefox is the best... I don't think there is a best yet. Firefox has its flaws.
If you don't want popups, adware, spyware, use a real browser like lynx.
I agree with his viewpoint as well.
;-).
I've developed in Mozilla and, recently, Firefox with very limited or no testing in IE. The JavaScript debugging features are far nicer and more compatible with my workflow than the facilities in IE, making Mozilla a winner for my development time.
Generally, I have found that if it works in Mozilla (and Firefox), then chances are extremely good that it will work in IE. The opposite isn't as generally true. As a result, testing in IE for me is an afterthought, if I remember at all. And I'm held responsible for it working on our end-users' systems, which means IE at the moment, and my experience thus far has made me so confident in Mozilla and Firefox that I really don't need to spend much or any time testing code changes in IE. No user-reported problems related to limited IE testing have come up thus far..
Though, I have not gone as far as advocating Mozilla and Firefox on my web sites. I only do that in person
It's been a while but I remember using Netscape 2, Netscape 3, Gold, and Netscape 4 up to 4.78.
All the download links I saw, on legit download sites and Netscape's site, pointed me to "Download Here" style links.
What I never saw was anything saying I had to pay for it, unless I was using it for a commercial purpose.
Where did all this guff about personal users having to pay for Netscape come from?
His name is Robert Paulsen...
Firefox is not necessarily ther best browser out there. But that's not really the point. Firefox is awakening people to the notion that there's something out there beyond Microsoft. Opera hasn't been able to do that successfully, but Firefox is getting all kinds of press, and more importantly, downloads. The more examples out there of Open Source software successfully taking on Microsoft, the better it is for Open Source in general.
There are other topics that get mentioned a lot on Slashdot. You may have noticed that stories about the so-called "Linux" operating system pop up frequently. This is also an Open Source project, and is fairly well-regarded by most Slashdotters.
Opera, while a spiffy li'l browser in some regards, is not an Open Source project, and it doesn't have as much momentum behind it, so it doesn't get much press on Slashdot. You don't hear much about Lisp or Smalltalk either. It doesn't mean that they're not great languages, it just means that most of the readers would rather talk about other things.
Why nobody has posted any stories about the last Raiders-Chiefs game is beyond me, though... .
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
How is saying that any better than the 1997-era "this site best viewed in X"?
"Best viewed in X Window System"? Were text mode web browsers such as Lynx still significantly popular compared to Netscape in 1997?
Oh, you mean best viewed in x, lowercase and oblique to show up as a variable name. I don't see a problem with "Best viewed with any browser that conforms to W3C recommendations".
Those who sacrifice security to condemn liberty deserve to repeat history or something. - Benjamin Santayana
okay, I used the Wayback machine to search Microsoft for IE that you can download. Unfortunetly, they don't have the actual page, but they do have the top downloads page, and it shows IE version 6
r osoft.com/downloads/searchdl.asp
http://web.archive.org/web/20020802081348/www.mic
Be seeing you...
He said that the latest nightly has been working fine all day.
guess we know which non-geek site is more intelligent!
I prefer Mozilla, it has more features geared toward professionals of the web.
No it's not, "the dog is on fire."
Every single browser has lost users each month since June 2004.
But only the browsers they track. I wonder how Safari and Konqueror are doing. Being a Unix-only browser, Konqueror isn't going to have stupendous stats, but I'm willing to bet it has more users than Netscape 3 which they do track. Come to think of it, why are they even tracking Netscape 3?
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
TB and Mozilla Mail before it do use MBOX files, with all the advantages and problems. They also use index files that mean they don't have to load the whole MBOX to get a message.
If TB takes a long time to start up, I don't want to think about the user's mail database size - and I have 800,000 or so messages myself.
MBOX:
Needs external index for seeking not to suck
Corrupted more easily than single-file stores
Harder to corrupt than database stores
Deleting is extremely slow, so most mail clients only actually delete messages by "compacting" periodically and just flag things for deletion the rest of the time.
Fast to read sequentially
Access from multiple clients sucks
Congrats, i completely changed over from IE a couple of days ago, It's a very handy program, especially with some of the great extensions such as fireFTP.
Skartel GamingOverload.com
That should read "So the fact that iexplore.exe isn't loaded on startup means nothing."
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
Some sites use ActiveX to embed WMP. Why? Don't ask me. But it makes it harder for me to find how the hell they embed the stuff because in order to playback in real time on my Celeron/700 I have to download the ASX, look for the reference and leech it with mmsclient, then play it with mplayer.
Moll.
What you hear in the ear, preach from the rooftop Matthew 10.27b
Not the only ones, I assure you. Any good standards-based web designer has by now had more than their fair share of headaches trying to tweak around IE's half-hearted CSS support.
If Firefox reaches a large enough marketshare (probably around 15%-25%), gone will be the days when an IE-only site is acceptable. Standards-based web design will become slowly become the rule, rather than the exception. As you say, either (1) we'll all fall in with the fox, or (2) MS will need to get IE out of its funk. Web designers will save hours when they can design a site once and not have to worry about 4-year-old rendering problems.
In the end, of course, the consumer will win even more. Widespread standards adoption will drive the further development of the web to everyone's benefit. Very neat things can be done with CSS, SVG, X-Forms and the like. Remember the days when competition between Netscape and IE brought out nifty new features on a regular basis (javascript, delicious delicacies, etc)? Thanks to Firefox, we'll hopefully be out of these doldrums very soon!
I love Firefox. But I don't dream the unrealistic. People are lying to themselves.
There are two HUGE lies:
Firefox will happily take market percentage points away from Explorer. Only to a point, it will never get more then 15-20% in my estimation. Security through obscurity is nice, but the masses will not bother; and probably never hear of Firefox.
Firefox is better. But MS is not unable to improve IE. Features like tabbed browsing, skins, live bookmarks are easily copied. It's age-old standard business practice to follow, not to lead. MS lets Opera, Firefox, etc. pioneer potential upgrades, that's all. It saves them cash. Wouldn't count them out security wise as well, SP2 is a huge improvement. Now Firefox might become a threat, the next SP or Windows release will just bring on a much improved IE, and IE will get back into the 90%+ market shares. Now I hope I'm wrong, but:
Dream on...
You say your Thunderbird experience was worse than your Firefox experience? I have noticed exactly the same slowness on Firefox. I am always embarrassed when trying to demonstrate it to friends: It takes ten or fifteen seconds to start up Firefox compared to about 5 seconds for IE. While we twiddle our thumbs waiting, I try to use the time to talk about the better security.
Maybe startup times are something competitive OSS projects need to look into more. Relative speed isn't a definable bug or feature we can put on a to-do list and then check off. But it does have a heavy impact on the bottom line of user experience.
Also, you can easily kill it running this script
Firefox allows you to download porn and warez easier, because all those sites use ActiveX to try to trap the user.
So there's 10 million pirating perverts out there - that's what this story really means.
Check this out:
e mcache
http://www.mozilla.org/support/firefox/tips#oth_m
You can specify how much RAM FF uses for its memory cache.
I changed mine and FF is using 60M with 12 tabs open.
ft
I'm doing the backpacking thing through Asia and India. A lot of computers / connections are slow so on every PC I use I install firefox. I'd say I've installed on around 30 pcs, and usually talk to most net cafe managers who quickly install it on the rest of their creaky boxen.
I've also noticed the last few weeks a lot of pcs already have firefox installed.
I agree with your sentiments completely, but the nature of open source tends to demolish the distinctions between the standard browser and a standard browser. It's much the same as the "World domination" from a few years ago. It's not really a case of being benign. The sense of excluding all others fizzles out. Firefox as the standard browser tends to imply that a bunch of others are at least almost as good, and we finally get to the point where choice of browser can be legitimately based on the whim of the momement. Whenever Firefox becomes the standard browser, it will be one of many standard browsers.
I've got several windoze machines, 2 of which have not been "re-installed" in quite some time, and both load IE almost instantly, whereas Firefox is a slow boat to... I'm curious why... but the more I use Firefox, the more I don't care.
-- No sig for you!
After using Firefox far more aggressively I am a pleased to say it does quite a bit. Very nice plugin support and very nice extensions for web developers. Also, because it does not support active X at all, it has a decent layer of security.
However, it has some very serious drawbacks. Firefox claims it is using a cutting edge framework and avoided the "per process" feature that IE has. This means IE lets me spawn a new IE process on demand if I wanted to. This has a lot of pros, including - security from cross-site scripting attacks, if you auth into one site, the other can never see your session cookies - isolation from crashing, one bad IE can only kill it's children, if you spawn a new instance on demand you restrict your damage - shut down plugins on demand to keep things very light, if my new IE spawn uses Java, I can kill that and still keep my existing IE windows. - lets me login to the same website multiple times with different credentials, this is handy for web devs and power users.
Unfortunately, the Mozilla framework, in their infinite wisdom decided not to support "per process" or even make it an option. A big surprise coming from people who planned on allowing extensions.
So now if someone does trick me into opening a URL and knows my web site habits, I will be vulnerable to a cross-site scripting attack. Of course, the Mozilla developers vehemently deny this, yet this is an ancient Bugtraq CSS attack technique that has been around for years.
They claim it's not common, is that why a "tiny" army of people have already complained?
They claim IE's way is not intuitive, could have fooled me. I can launch multiple spawns in about 1-2 seconds thanks to the way IE defaults to new spawn process via shortcut.
They claim it's secure. That's why kiosk developers have already complained that it makes it difficult if not impossible to run a serious kiosk?
Their "workaround" was to run as a different profile on demand? That means I have to save all tabs, shutdown everything, then restart as a different profile? Sorry, I actually keep my machine running for months on end with IE Windows nested far up my taskbar (I dont' use XP, I hate the "bundled taskbar windows idea"). Now I have to kill all of them before I open a foreign URL in fear of Cross-site scripting? And thanks to the ridiculous load up time (which I cannot blame them entirely for), this makes it more expensive to do.
Sorry, just that the Mozilla developer's attitude is disgusting. A Mozilla developer insisted "per process was monolithic" and this issue was only a big deal "three years ago". (https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=8617 4) Gee, this is the
same stupid behavior Netscape used for years. So where is the "cutting
edge" non-monolithic feel? Because, running a handful of browser
windows at a time and being forced to close every single one out sure
feels more monolithic to me. That's exactly the reason why Unix GUI
browsers were horrible for power users, and now it turns out Firefox
heads just re-continued the monolithic thinking. Good job!
The Firefox developers insisted this isn't a security issue (oh but it is), insisted it is a pointless feature (web devs and power users use this all the time), and insisted no one does this (right, that's why now they are seeing flak beyond flak?).
I totally understand if they cannot fix it easily due to their poor design choice early on. However, their rational for being unable to do so is a huge cop out. Their poor design skill in the beginning only made me wonder once again, how grounded to reality are these open source developers?
Ok so is this just FUD or is he on to something? He claims a pretty big security hole, one that I don't think I have seen discussed here or elsewhere. I'm by no means a security expert but this sounds pretty serious to me.
"Trying is only the first step towards failure." - Homer
I admin a couple of high volume sites which are aimed to towards the average internet user. I have seen a massive increase in firefox users over last few months. Firefox sat on 1% at beginning of the year, climbed to 3% by september. But is currently up to 15% in december. Its growth appears expential.
All of these browser-sniffing "arms races" have caused user agent strings to have very little resemblance to the actual names and versions of the browsers they represent. I've got some more comments on this in my site:
http://webtips.dan.info/brand-x/useragent.html
--Dan
Web Tips
Slashdot, please remove that Mozilla logo and replace it with Firefox logo on stories that have something to do with Firefox. You are confusing consumers by using Mozilla logo on Firefox stories.
Anyway, it's time to rejoice! Let's arrange IE funerals again!
Come on, The 2005 Nobel Prize in Open Source Web Browsers is awarded to ..., has a nice ring to it, doesn't it? You know it does, admit it.
They include the December statistics, and it has already increased more than in the past month, and it's still only 12th of December...
They are showing percentages, the fact that its the 12th does not show whether Firefox is doing better or worse. It's all proportional. geddit?
This is not the sig you are looking for...
For example, suppose you had
Your average (read, doesn't know what he's doing) web dev could get at that name field by using
This javascript will work in IE, but in order to get it to work under FireFox, you have to reference the field properly:
IE allows sloppy developers to get away with murder. An example of poorly-written HTML that renders properly under IE (and Netscape...), not under FireFox:
The correct HTML:Yeah, right.
Ok, so "it seems like Firefox has finally reached 10 million downloads..." What's the actual download count then?
where the rabbit is for duracell.
I am NaN
What you can do is put a tiny Firefox button on your website, preferrably shown only to IE-users.
Sure, a single banner impression won't make anybody switch browsers, but when users see Firefox buttons on many different websites, they will sooner or later check it out.
So, is there at all ANY reason why one would need MSIE? Stupid users aint one of them anymore as one can easily make the Firefox launch icon a big blue e, and there are even MISE themes for god's sake!
Now that they've reached 10 million, does that mean they'll finally get to work on releasing 1.01? Because 1.0 keeps crashing on me for some reason everytime I close it. Not when I use it, mind you, but just when I close it.
Derive Politics
Maybe you should just put some egg whites in a test tube and see what happens. Then all you have to do is explain the results.
I switched over my nieces to firefox but I still have to let them use IE because of MTV. Does anyone know how to get the videos on MTVs website to launch in firefox?
x .jhtml?vid=9602&orgID=2&gateway=news&paid=0§io n_0=news§ion_1=topics§ion_2=d§ion_3=di mebag_darrell§ion_4=&refURL=/news/topics/d/dim ebag_darrell/&adPth=/adsetup/news/topics/&adPN=ind ex
:)
http://www.mtv.com/sitewide/apps/mediaplayer/inde
No they don't listen to pantera; this one is for me
Looks like we slashdotted it, and the NYUD cache gives an error.
I'm still a loyal user of Mozilla on Linux and FreeBSD, because it as an enormous number of features which FireFox lacks (speaking of just the browser component, not News, Mail, or the Kitchen sink).
In my tests (launching the binary and killing it from the launch script), Firefox is about 1-2 seconds slower to launch than Mozilla (1.7.3 anyway) on my hardware, which is to say, a paltry Thinkpad T23 laptop.
I prefer Mozilla for speed, significanly more features, and the level of HTML and CSS it supports. Oddly, FireFox is based on the same Gecko engine, but lacks some very basic CSS and HTML support that causes pages and fonts under FireFox to render horribly, while they render to pefection under Mozilla.
As a full-time web-developer, knowing that I don't have to keep using 0.5em fonts to look "normal" under FireFox, and microscopically-small under every other browser, because FireFox's rendering is wrong, is key. I test under FireFox, as part of our 13-browser QA test suite, but I RELY on the output of Mozilla to tell me what is right.
FireFox has some bugs, but it does work for the basic web surfing users and home users. For real development, where the browser is an actual tool, I'll stick with Mozilla.
Had WINE installed, and Evolution set to hand off to it, and found himself running a 'doze zombie controller. Yeurgh! Flee the taint! (-:
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
It's nice to see this (way better) alternative to IE becoming so popular. But it keeps bugging me that I have to patch up a lot of PC's from people who get the newest worms or viruses on their PC, thanks to IE bugs...
Even when these people dislike IE and install Mozilla right away, they are still stuck with IE installed somewhere on the background...
If IE wouldn't have been installed in the first place, it would save A LOT of bandwidth for every customer and for MS themselves. I'm not even talking about all the hours of programming time it would save them, since they wouldn't have to write bugfixes for IE all the time...
But it's MS again, and as much as I have their way of handling their customers, it's the same people who are standing at my front door, asking to repair their PC, who are the victoms.
I'm not even talking about Outlook and OE.
So hooray for Mozilla! I know that I have a fair share in this number, since I installed Mozilla numerous times on the MS-victims PC's.
Cheers for the programmers of Mozilla! Keep on going!
I give massages and reiki treatments (for real!). More info here: http://www.universele-levensenergie.be
It means: stop doing this, do something else instead. It's related to pain.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
Better than staying on windows and using ie which you'll be lucky to have work flawlessly or otherwise for more than 30 minutes.
The Farewell Tour II
I've probably downloaded 10 million files on my own in the last few years. And, come on, Internet Explorer has probably been downloaded a billion times.
Why do we keep giving front-page status to Mozilla download milestones? Is it really that significant?
Why? I have poor eyes and I like to swithch from 100% to 200% and 300% magnification ALL THE TIME. I use very large fonts even for 100% (My default settings: 36 point for proportional fonts 20 point for monospace).
All firefox improvements have no use for me if I cannot change the magnification from 100% to 300% in a single step(this is possible in Netscape and Mozilla but not in Firefox or IE)
BTW I HATE the new HTML enhancements, who needs them? HTML 1 and 2 were great, no useless frames and other things, just text. Back in 1995-1996 you could change the font sizes to 200% or 300% without any unexpected results. Today for some pages, increasing the font size 2 or 3 times may result in overlaping fonts or extremely long lines. I have io import the text in a text editor in order to be able to read it!.
Why it is not possible to change the magnification in a single step in Firefox? It is possible in Mozilla, why not in Firefox?
MOD PARENT -5, boring as fuck
Can you post a copy of your pretty graph?
True. ...
They are trying to create much more important monopolies than with web browsers: in areas such as game consoles (and game production tools), PDA's, mobile phones, PC-DRM, high definition video formats, Online music/video shopping, player devices
IMO they'll succeed in at least PC-DRM and HD-DVD/blu-ray and maybe PDA's (but they will become replaced by pda-phone hybrids anyway)
but I don't see any way of converting that into the actual userbase
Instead of trying to figure it out from downloads, why don't we just count off?
One...
On the other hand, in some corners, it is all about market share, so you have to pander to the lowest common denominator.
I, for one, applaud FF's adherance to the standards, because when I make a page, I make sure it works right under FF, then hack it up to work under IE. Best of both worlds, but if you try it for any length of time, you'll realize what a stinking POS IE is...
Yeah, right.
That was my point...
I'm not a prophet or a stone-age man,
I'm just a mortal with potential of a super man.
I tried Firefox before and loved the functionality and speed. However it kept temporarily going into never-neverland locking up my machine for 30-90 seconds at a time. I refreshed my Win2K machine (for other reasons) and decided to try again because of the 1.0 release. It did the same thing again!
Their succinct advice for Linux users?
Congratulations Firefox!
Sig goes here.
Not that it probably matters, here much, but the OSX version needs even more work than the other versions. Unless it's able to open a bookmark from the main menu without having a browser window open yet? Is it doing that over in PC World? Not over here.
I don't imagine the PC guys have to worry about .pkg issues, either, like the fact that your Search additions ( a truly great extensible item to replace those ubiquitous 'Google'-ized, search windows) get over-written in an update to the browser because the user-added items are cached in the .pkg instead of in the User profile. (which would make 100% more sense, there being exactly zero logic to the status quo). The .pkg is what gets clobbered in an update. Oops.
And the 'speed' thing? Hmmm, it isn't as fast as Safari or Camino, and none of them are as fast as IE in the OS 9 environment (running in the emulated "Classic', to boot).
And 'footprint' ? Oops, 25 MB on OSX, vs. 2.2 for Safari, and even the old slug, Opera, only weighs in at 9.6...if they aren't careful it'll be the 'free' Opera, before long, heheh.
I use it half the time too, and was raving about it in other forums (Mac-related) for a few months. But my 'other' browser is OmniWeb, and yeah it costs money, but it's only a handful of tweaks from having worked-out versions of Firefox's coolest Extensions built-in. (Omni's ad blocking is clunky, and the search customization is equally cumbersome, compared to the real ease of Firefox's utilities. Omni is still the 'alternative' browser on the Mac, as far as I can see.
One of the greatest aspects of Firefox, to me, is its huge base of support and development. I don't use VPC, or even my classified/net-isolated PC at work, for any web-related stuff, at all, so the fact that Firefox is 'way better than IE on Windows' means zero to me.
But I do hope it spreads like fucking wildfire, if only to rock the sloppy Web designers and Front Page users into getting on board with some standards. With IE under assault, Front Page in decline, and Oracle (pray to God) liquidating PeopleSoft, well, Hell, the Web's starting to smell slightly better already.
.... can be turned off.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Regarding the speed of IMAP, I most vehemently disagree. There are many ways to make IMAP access faster that clients can - and do - implement. Options include:
Local header and flags cache with UUID invalidation
Smart header downloading (eg messages in client's current view, then new messages, then old messages)
Local message caching
Background message downloading
If you want to see the difference a client can make, I strongly suggest you compare mutt and Ximian Evolution. Evolution isn't even all that good - mulberry leaves it in the dust.
As for maildir - I agree. I like the maildir design, and when I need local mailboxes I always end up using maildir or some close relation of it. I didn't mention it earlier simply because it wasn't relevent - I wasn't writing a comprehensive mail storage format summary. My personal needs mean that an IMAP server is better for me (though the IMAP server I use, Cyrus IMAPd, has maildir-like back-end storage), and I find it performs very well indeed.
One issue you didn't mention with maildir is its dependency on the filesystem not being crap. Maildir really needs a _fast_ filesystem - especially fast at handling many small files. It also needs a filesystem that doesn't have low limits on directory size. Not a problem for me, but a very real one for others.
Yeah, right.
10 million downloads show a lot of interest in firefox, heck I downloaded it and am one of those 10 million but I don't use it. I was curious from all the hype surrounding firefox.
The number of downloads really doesn't indicate how many people are using it a week or a month after downloading it. I wonder how many people went back to ie after experiencing some of the bugs which have been reported or finding out they had to patch firefox because of security issues?
Can anyone say for sure how many people actually use firefox?