Slashdot Mirror
Firefox nears 50 Million Downloads
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!"
The subset of people who visit Network Mirror are showing 75% Firefox & 22% IE.
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
The Army reading list
Anyone find it odd that the spreadfirefox image galleries don't display properly in firefox (e.g. http://www.spreadfirefox.com/?q=image/tid/42). Maybe 1600x1200 is just too much for the page? Who knows?
Seriously... Zonk won because he posted this on slashdot...
But shouldn't it be 50 mil / 4 = 12.5 mil because almost all users automatically updated from 1.0.0.0 to .1, .2 and then .3?
Yes, but while there are people like you who download it many times, there are other people who download it once and deploy it many times, or use a package manager to install it. 50 000 000 is a pretty big number, so everything pans out eventually.
Usage is the best metric of Firefox's success; however, you can't measure it, as different sites have different hit rates, no doubt many have already been mentioned. Downloads is the best count we have because it's actually measurable.
Guy asked me for a quarter for a cup of coffee. So I bit him.
OK, now that so many home users have Firefox, and that it works really well, maybe it is time to tackle the corporate front?
.ini file as argument to the install, specifying:
.ini or whatever should also expand environment variables like %username%, %userprofile%, etc. (and $HOME etc. on Unix).
FF could be made much easier and practical for administrators to deploy.
There is FFDeploy, but I would hope for something better and easier.
A possibility would be to allow some
- profile location (with the possibility to leave out that stupid random directory name in the profile path),
- a cache directory separate from the profile folder and/or the right registry entries so the cache isn't copied over the network at every logon/logoff.
- extensions to be installed straight away,
- etc.
That
If you are deploying FF on your network, have you found a way to do it without going to every machine and setting it up manually?
There was a story a while back about flaws in Firefox and that it should integrate an instant messenger client. Kinda...
My idea is to have a IM/IRC panel that automatically shows other Firefox users with their windows open to the same page or maybe site. Just think how cool it would be if you read some comment on Slashdot and it says the author is online; you can chat and followup a discussion without having to post lots of +0 Noise posts that nobody else really cares about anyway. Or maybe you're reading some technical article and see a few other Firefox users on the same page -- you can ask them some question specific to that page (one might be the author with the page open in firefox to answer questions, ask readers what they think of the wroiting, etc).
If done right this could be pretty darn cool IMO. It has to be done with the browser because basically it should be a system that applies to all websites. This would also be a great social aspect to help build the Firefox community. The server load could be balanced by hashing the site or URL and thereby dividing the load on the browser end.