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.

25 of 600 comments (clear)

  1. Great! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:Great! by kai.chan · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Now either Microsoft attempts to get their act together or everyone (myself included) will just go for Firefox.

      Everyone did. My site is as far from a tech-oriented site, and from the past few months of observation, Firefox has increase from ~9% of total visitor browser usage to the current 25+%.

  2. Rollover by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Funny

    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.

  3. It's just funny to me... by mat+catastrophe · · Score: 5, Funny

    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
  4. IE IS DEAD! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    IE is dead! Netcraft confirmeth!

    1. Re:IE IS DEAD! by Zocalo · · Score: 4, Insightful
      Good fscking riddence if it is given the appalling implementation of CSS in IE that MS claims is "standards compliant". I've just put together a CSS based website using Firefox to do my initial development. OK, I'm a little on the cutting edge with the design, but Opera, Safari and Konqi all manage at least a passable stab at rendering it - nothing that you'd know was a problem unless you knew to look for it. IE, on the otherhand, is just so far out there you wouldn't believe with radically different renderings between platforms, IE versions, even Service Pack levels, and don't even get me started on "Quirks" and "Standards" modes...

      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!
  5. well the statistics are flawed by Nadsat · · Score: 5, Funny

    I downloaded 8 million of them myself. So the numbers perhaps are slightly misleading.

    1. Re:well the statistics are flawed by Zocalo · · Score: 4, Insightful
      But by a similarly exaggerated amount I downloaded one copy and deployed it onto 8 million PCs, so it probably balances out. 10m downloads is all very impressive, but I don't see any way of converting that into the actual userbase that would be any more reliable than taking a guess. In addition to the above cases you've also got people that have since removed it (wait till the next IE exploit, fools!), installs onto multiuser systems, those that have installed from magazine cover disks, third party package archives or distro updates.

      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!
  6. Re:Not there yet... by Hamstaus · · Score: 5, Informative

    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"
  7. Re:New York Times Advertisement? by ScriptMonkey · · Score: 5, Funny

    I dunno. How many 'a's are there in 'anal-retentive'?

  8. Re:I'm stuck on Bio Chem - Help me geeks! by orangepeel · · Score: 5, Funny

    Answer: The dog is on fire.

    --
    Whoever designed level 61 in Frozen Bubble is a sadistic bastard.
  9. Meanwhile at W3schools, things are moving... fast by Jugalator · · Score: 4, Informative

    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!
  10. Whoops that was me by Control-Z · · Score: 4, Funny


    I've been trying to download it on a crappy dialup connection. Sorry, sorry.

  11. Some Perspective by FlipmodePlaya · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

  12. Google Suggest by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    Speaking of firefox. They already have an extension for google suggest Check it out:

    http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?t=1821 86

    i see some problems with it but it has potential..

  13. Re:Taking it back by Eric+Giguere · · Score: 4, Interesting

    No, the work's not over yet, and I think it's time to focus attention on Thunderbird, because Outlook Express is also a security risk. Just replacing IE on a machine won't be enough, in my opinion.

    Now, I've not had as good an experience with Thunderbird as with Firefox, so that's a problem. Large message databases that open very quickly with OE take on the order of 10-15 seconds with Thunderbird 1.0, which is a significant difference. That could give newbies a bad impression of TB, even though feature-wise it's way ahead of OE.

    Eric
    JavaScript is not Java
  14. Re:New York Times Advertisement? by Daniel · · Score: 4, Funny

    Two.

    --
    Hurry up and jump on the individualist bandwagon!
  15. Re:I'm stuck on Bio Chem - Help me geeks! by echocharlie · · Score: 5, Informative

    This is an in-joke from another Slashdot article. It's funny once you get the context.

  16. Re: 10 million enlightened folks by gidds · · Score: 5, Insightful
    We need to keep up with this momentum to make firefox the standard browser.

    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.

  17. Re:New York Times Advertisement? by AyeRoxor! · · Score: 5, Funny

    Any who love knowledge want to be told when they are wrong; it is stupid to hate being corrected.

    loves

    should want

  18. Re:Including... by FyRE666 · · Score: 4, Informative

    Firefox typically opens within a couple seconds of clicking whatever needs to use it. I routinely had IE take half a minute.

    Ok, I use Firefox as my main browser on Windows, OSX and Linux. I rarely use IE on Windows for any reason any more, BUT it launches instantly when I do use it. This is much faster than Firefox, and understandable since much of it is already loaded after bootup. If you really were waiting for 30 seconds for IE to come up, then something is seriously screwed up on your system...

  19. Re:Taking it back by nolife · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I have been using Thunderbird since about 0.4. It is my primary email and non binary usenet reader application and has been since I first started using it. At home, all of my accounts are IMAP and although I have some very large folders, it works very good and no difference in speed from OE, Eudora and several other IMAP capable readers I've used. At work I use on my Linux desktop to connect to our Exchange server via IMAP and it does seem to take a little long to open large folders (more then 1000 mails and some up to several 1000) that have not been accessed for a long time. Of course, I do not have an option to compare that exact setup to OE.

    --
    Bad boys rape our young girls but Violet gives willingly.
  20. porn - why firefox will take market share by rich42 · · Score: 5, Funny
    Firefox is generally better than IE for web surfing.

    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...

  21. Keep discovering new great things about Firefox by Nice2Cats · · Score: 4, Informative
    I probably am the last person here to figure this out, but in the last two weeks, I have grown to love two features of Firefox I wasn't aware of before:

    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.

  22. Firefox still has one major issue by __aailob1448 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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)