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!"
Any devs volunteered to swim the Pacific over this?
Massive networking attempt for friends
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
Did the article just ask me to go on a mass shooting spree while wearing a firefox shirt?
Well, I'm told GNU is like a Virus, and FireFox is open source, so I can think of a great way *I'd* like to spread it!
Of course, they may have trouble posting the pictures on spreadfirefox!
--LWM
Besides, real men use Opera.
All you need to do is hack paris hiltons new blackberry, put in a folder called pics, include firefox.exe in it.. release details on slashdot as a troll. BAM. 2 billion installs.
** "It's not my job to stand between the people talking to me, and the ones listening to me." -- Pego the Jerk
I just dipped a few dozen foxes in lighter fluid and set them scurrying around the park aflame, but those damn firefox people just called me a sick bastard.
Joking aside, is this just 1.0+ downloads, or all downloads ever?
Going back to school for entry-level jobs?
Just 1.0+ downloads.
jX [ Make everything as simple as possible, but no simpler. - Einstein ]
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?
I will celebrate by rounding up 50,000 actual foxes and setting them all on fire!
And to really turn it in to a spectacle, I will call PITA and give them advanced warning of the event, so they can round up whoever they can find to try to stop me... and then I'll do it an hour earlier than I said I would.
MWwaaah-hahahahaha!!!
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
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)
Binary milestones are for nerds. They are what matters.
Transcend Humanity. Please.
Seriously... Zonk won because he posted this on slashdot...
I suspect that a few of the responses to this campaign will have the hapless promoters throwing their hands in front of their eyes, whimpering, "I really didn't need to see that..."
You can't talk about Wikipedia's flaws on Wikipedia
I can now download Firefox at a blazing 6.7kbps.
/.er is downloading Firefox just to make the counter go up.
And it looks like every
As if this wasn't expected.
Wer mit Ungeheuern kämpft, mag zusehn, dass er nicht dabei zum Ungeheuer wird. --Nietzsche
I opened up two copies of the spreadfirefox counter page, and the counts differed. That is odd.
"I'm not impatient. I just hate waiting." - My Dad
Need to fly around the world naked by flapping arms with a sparkler hanging out his butt.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
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?
DL source... check
Add a couple of bits of code from Bagle and Netsky... check
Compiles... check
Crack the server, upload the new release...
Welcome to 100 million Firefoxes overnight!
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?
We're not counting those users who updated via our application update mechanism.
- A
Even Old Testament folks were getting down with Firefox: "And Samson went and caught three hundred foxes, and took firebrands, and turned tail to tail, and put a firebrand in the midst between two tails. And when he had set the brands on fire, he let them go into the standing Corn of the Philistines, and burnt up both the shocks, and also the standing corn, with the vineyards and olives." "Then the Philistines said, Who hath done this? And they answered, Samson, the son in law of the Timnite, because he had taken his wife, and given her to his companion. And the Philistines came up, and burnt her and her father with fire." (Judges 15:1-6 KJV)
It doesn't render properly in Firefox or Konqueror. Must be one of those IE only sites.
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?
Skype doesn't face the compitition Firefox does - there's not vendor installing a similar application with every copy of the OS
This article isn't news, and it doesn't really matter. Most /. articles fall into at least one of those categories. Its not like Firefox released a new version, or was offering new services. This article is advertisement encouraging people to visit the website and brand themselves for some 'secret prizes'.
This is my last post.
[6th Estate]
Firefox asks me to update when a new version is released but it really just downloads another version. It would be cool if they did something that just updated it self instead of just downloading a new version.
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.
Step 1: Paint SPREADFIREFOX.com on chest
Step 2: Wear baby-blue tutu under clothes
Step 3: Attend Olympic sporting event
Step 4: Remove clothes
Step 5: Dive from Olympic diving board
Step 6: uh... profit?
Getting a bunch of PETA members somewhere by setting a bunch of foxes on fire?
That's just plain flamebait!
This broadcast was brought to you by Fox News.
(Sorry, couldn't resist the pun.)
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.
Not quite. It is a real counter that synchronizes with the actual number every 60 seconds. In the interim, it increases by a constantly adjusting rate that's usually pretty close to correct. See http://www.infocraft.com/projects/ffcounter/
No. Just straight DLs, not the Update feature. So my downloads of 1.0.2 and 1.0.3 weren't counted, just my FTP of 1.0.1, for example.
jX [ Make everything as simple as possible, but no simpler. - Einstein ]