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Firefox nears 50 Million Downloads

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the that's-a-lot-of-foxen dept.

bluephone writes "Firefox hit 49,000,000 downloads last night. Today, as we approach 50,000,000, SpreadFirefox is offering prizes for photographic proof of your most amazing spectacles to celebrate. To quote: 'We have a handful of unique prizes that you won't find anywhere else, and we're asking you to do one simple thing to claim one: impress us. As we drive toward 50 million downloads, do something so cool, so unusual and so spectacular to spread Firefox that we can't help but scurry around the Mozilla Foundation to tell every one.' But you don't have long. The Infocraft Firefox Counter shows just over 800,000 downloads left at the time of this submission!"

2 of 314 comments (clear)

  1. Not wanting to be pessimist... by jawtheshark · · Score: 5, Insightful
    but, I alone, have been responsible for at least 20 different downloads? Why? I don't carry around my USB stick all the time and when I want to install it somewhere, I just re-download it. Also this can't be the downloads of a single release: it's the total downloads since version 1.0? If yes, how about the people that redownloaded just because a new version came out?

    Of course, often a download my indicate more than one install: at my parents, I downloaded the program once and installed it on all machines (4 in total)

    So, we cannot say much from download numbers about the spread of the program. We still have the risk that we geeks/nerds download it for people and those people stick to IE. Case in point: I'm a teacher and all my pupils use IE. Even though, I always tell them to use Firefox. Why? Don't ask me... I'm only doing this job since january.

    --
    Ahhh...the great dumpster continuum. Many a free computer will be found there. -- sowth (748135)
  2. Re:When it gets more stable... by __aaitqo8496 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I'm the world's biggest fan of Microsoft. To me, Microsoft Excel is the best application ever written, and Microsoft C#/.NET is the best programming language and operating environment ever developed.

    Oh yeah, that sounds like an objective web page. How much more stable do you need? I only rarely experience problems with firefox, and those typically are attributed to crappy plugin implementations (such as Adobe's PDF Reader - which I've since stopped using, the resource hog it is).

    Further, regarding the il rendering of slashdot, maybe if the site code maintainers would update the template to something that actually validates, everything would Just Work. As of now, Slashdot doesn't even validate at HTML 3.2. It includes no character encoding information and the SGML parser on W3 comes up with 114 errors. Maybe they could follow some advice and Retool Slashdot with web standards.