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.
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.
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!
I downloaded 8 million of them myself. So the numbers perhaps are slightly misleading.
The Custom Mary
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.
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...
Apparently, it was delayed because they were changing it and adding much more of something (signatures or something I believe) than originally planned. Still, it probably won't be more than a few months away at most. Honestly though, this is just to flaunt it in Microsoft's face. I doubt that many people will be convinced to get Firefox from an ad in the Times, but it certainly won't hurt.
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
my non-geek website is still showing 2% of firefox users
Well, mileage may vary. In contrast, my non-geek website is showing IE's share down to about 85%, with Firefox up to 5.7% and Mozilla up to 3%. We get about 60,000 unique visitors a month, so I feel comfortable in using the log benchmarks (AWStats) as at least a semi-definitive source when I look at the browser stats these days. It's enough traffic to provide a significant data set.
I moderate "-1, Fool"
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.
I dunno. How many 'a's are there in 'anal-retentive'?
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!
I've been trying to download it on a crappy dialup connection. Sorry, sorry.
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.
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..
Two.
Hurry up and jump on the individualist bandwagon!
This is an in-joke from another Slashdot article. It's funny once you get the context.
AnimeNEXT anime convention
Any who love knowledge want to be told when they are wrong; it is stupid to hate being corrected.
loves
should want
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"
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
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!
Dunno, but are you sure that's hyphenated?
dominionrd.blogspot.com - Restaurants on
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.
Bill Gates?
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
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...
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.
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.
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?
Indeed. Looking at the stats for Stuff.co.nz - one of New Zealand's largest news sites - I see Firefox currently at around 8-9% and the total for all of Mozilla at around 13-14%. That's on traffic of around 7-8 million hits per day.
Not a geek site this one - Linux usage is around 1%.
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.
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)
For repackaged version for Firefox 1.0
p ic =190
http://www.extensionsmirror.nl/index.php?showto
Adobe Acrobat's little "extras" mess up more than just Firefox. .
Try Adobe Reader SpeedUp, available at http://www.tnk-bootblock.co.uk/prods/misc/
It turns off a lot of the unwanted cruft in Acrobat and really speeds it up.
Before I ran it, if Acrobat was active, Firefox would crash when I tried to close it. Since I ran it, no prob!
The U.S. really needs an English to Wisdom dictionary.
iexplore.exe is just a stub. The majority of the code is in a .dll file (whose name escapes me at the moment) that is loaded by explorer.exe (i.e., the shell itself). So the fact that iexplore.exe means nothing.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
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
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?