Slashdot Mirror
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.
I don't recall anybody downloading IE
so. your point?
I'd Tell you all my secrets but I lie about my past
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.
Even so, I'd say it's pretty certain that the total number of people using Firefox v1.0 on a regular basis is *much* higher than 10m, and still growing...
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
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.
Total time to develop website - 1 week. Total time to hack the CSS/HTML about to get it working in at least a reasonable number of IE varients - five weeks and counting... Seeing Firefox stomp on IE's marketshare - priceless! To develop a standards compliant website, there's open source, for anything else there's Microsoft...
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
No you don't. You need to keep up with this momentum to make Firefox a standard browser.
Make anything the one and only standard, and you're back to a monoculture, with all the potential problems that embodies. (Yes, I know that Firefox would by its nature be a much more benign monoculture, but that wouldn't prevent those problems.)
Firefox is a great app, and I'm very pleased for its success, but it's not The One True Browser. Instead, it's the browser that's good enough to show that there's a whole family of True Browsers, and that once people start coding to standards we all benefit, whether we user Firefox, Camino, Safari, Opera, Konqueror, OmniWeb, Lynx, or whatever.
Please don't get all arrogant and monopolistic now!
Ceterum censeo subscriptionem esse delendam.
It's true. 10 million downloads != 10 million users. I've got 2 just on my laptop.
What the hell was I supposed to be doing? I was going to do something, and now I'm on
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 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.
Develop a CCS based look for your website. Use IE during development.... When things are supposed to be padded, the mozilla based browsers actually increase the size of the actual container.
That's the way width is supposed to work in CSS. But I guess that's what you get for using a non-compliant browser as your reference rendering and then trying to test in compliant browsers afterwards.
Just because you made it work in FireFox doesn't mean it complies.
Funny. It seems to me that you make it work in Internet Explorer, and then assume it complies. A little hypocritical, don't you think? Not to mention backward, nine times out of ten, when Internet Explorer acts one way and Firefox acts another, it's Internet Explorer that has got it wrong.
I have, from personal experience, found out that IE is the most CSS compliant of all browsers available.
Go read the spec. Internet Explorer can't handle half the selectors, can't handle tables, can't handle generated content, can't handle miscellaneous other properties... do I really have to make a list?
Plus I like the fact that MS doesn't invent new crap and start pushing it as a standard in their browser.
Okay, now I know you're either crazy or trolling. I should have twigged when you said that Internet Explorer was the most CSS compliant.
Thanks for posting this. I think it's great to see the viewpoint of somebody that is not as "techie" as everyone else around here. If everyone I know really knew about everything Firefox is capable of doing, there would be no question about switching browsers. It's trying to get them to give it an honest shot that's the hard part.
I can honestly say that everyone I know that has given it a shot and used it for a little while eventually realizes how much better it is. It took forever to get my mom and wife to switch, but now that they have they love it.
Provided that you only use those bits of CSS that IE actually does right, which is a fair amount to be fair, then it probably is. The same holds true for all the other rendering engines of course, each has their own quirks and issues, but at least they are getting stomped on with each successive release. Unless Microsoft changes its plans again (very possible) we're not likely to see much improvement in IE's rendering issues before the release of Longhorn, whenever that finally turns out to be.
As to my specific site development, I did check with W3C - frequently since I don't do this for a living - and I started developing the page templates exactly as you suggested but using Firefox in place of Opera, doing spot checks in other browsers here and there, and using a CSS validator. I was hitting IE anomalies almost from the start, and putting all the fixes and hacks from A List Apart etc. into CSS under development was making things much harder to keep track of, so I decided, for better or worse, to fix IE at the end, via a dedicated CSS if need be.
Even so, that still doesn't explain how a page design that validates 100% compliant, displays OK in recent versions of Firefox, Konqi, Opera, Safari *and* Netscape doesn't work in IE if it's as CSS compliant as you suggest. It *especially* doesn't explain why it doesn't work in IE in completely different ways depending on what version of IE you are using, or if you compare the renderings from the same version on a PC and a Mac for that matter. MS might have learned to submit ideas for approval before implementing them, but they also appear to need the most work on fixing what has been approved already.
CSS was supposed to make web design easier, and once I decided to temporarily shelve IE support from my site design then it was, but until *all* browsers are in agreement with the W3C about what the specifications mean, that's going to be largely a pipe dream I fear. CSS nirvana currently isn't likely to happen until Longhorn's IE at least, assuming that all the other rendering engines iron out their kinks by then too, and ignoring legacy browser support issues. That all adds up to an awful lot of headaches for professional web developers in the interim.
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
Provided that you only use those bits of CSS that IE actually does right, which is a fair amount to be fair, then it probably is.
....
:)
:hover settings to highlight those when the mouse goes over those. But no, netscape wouldn't know what you're talking about. Opera does this right BTW.
we're not likely to see much improvement in IE's rendering issues before the release of Longho...<snip>
Two valid points. I just have a problems with the padding. Since I put DIVs on the page and just pad them to move the content a little over so as to not have it touch the adjoining divs or "columns", it bugs me that it's not done right in a product developed mostly open source and by people not held back by managers and marketing strategies and all middle layer as opposed to IE or other such products.
Even so, that still doesn't explain how a page design that validates 100% compliant, displays OK in recent versions of Firefox, Konqi, Opera, Safari *and* Netscape doesn't
For a page to validate, it means your usage is correct. Not necessarily that the rendering is going to be the same as the picture you have in your head.
Opera has been the closest to IE. In my personal experience (without insulting anyone else) if something looks different in IE and mozilla (& family) then Opera would render it like IE 90% of times.
CSS was supposed to make web design easier,
Yeah, I try to remove features that cause problems in any browsers. I still love using CSS because when your banner and menu colors are getting too annoying, you change it in one place.
Oh and don't get me started on the link tag not being a proper block in mozilla (& family). You can't set the width of the links tag (<a>). For menus it's nice to set all their widths to a certain size and just use the
Firefox's own main page used to display incorrectly in firefox and used to display correctly in IE for a while but then it was fixed. I was showing it to my firefox loving friend and he pretty much dismissed it as not much of a problem. But the point stands.
I prefer Mozilla, it has more features geared toward professionals of the web.
The real victory is keeping the variety high enough for websites to be kept from specializing on any given browser. As long as alternatives total more than about 10%, most sites can't afford to require that people use IE.
I rarely criticize things I don't care about.
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...
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.
Tabbrowser Preferences 1.1.1 has no options I can see for saving sessions. Does it still cause the browser to crash when you click on a PDF file?
How am I supposed to fit a pithy, relevant quote into 120 characters?