Slashdot Mirror
Firefox Breaks 50,000,000 Barrier
MrDrBob writes "Today at 16:59 GMT (8:58 AM PST) Mozilla Firefox received its 50,000,000th download. To celebrate, SpreadFirefox.com has created a special page, where you can watch the downloads continue to climb in real time. Three cheers for Firefox! May it go on swiftly to 100,000,000!"
Approaches 50 million downloads...
Hits 50 million downloads...
Tomorrows article: Firefox approaches 50 1/2 million downloads...
See it's not a dupe! Because it's a million more, COMPLETELY different!
(right now there it is being downloaded about twice per second, I wonder what effect Slashdot will have)
That if they reach 100 million downloads in the next four days, Blake Ross will fly to the moon under his own power.
"Today at 16:59 GMT (8:58 AM PST) ..."
*blink*
So how many unique users does that translate to? Anyone with a reasonable estimate?
Seems you need a swimmer now to cross some large body of water
On four different machines sitting in front of me, the counter is off by about 500 between the lowest and the highest. \
:)
While the counter is cute, I'd call it a bogometer.
just like everything else
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Does this mean Stallman will swim across the Atlantic 50 times?
Want to improve your Karma? Instead of "Post Anonymously", try the "Post Humously" option.
It's like gmail's counter. Too bad it doesn't benefit (directly) the people viewing it. But it's good to know there's that level of interest.
I don't get it.
Swim that fucking ocean, bitch!
Erm, wrong browser. Whoops.
By summer it was all gone...now shesmovedon. --
God bless 'em... that is all.
I expected to hear this after the email update this morning.
I have downloaded firefox like 30 times. Due to installs, re-installs, upgrades, downgrades, and just for the hell of it, it mounts up. Not to say this isnt an achievement... one of my progects is currently on about 50 downloads, after 3 years. But still, I'd like to see more concrete numbers than downloads. Gratz, ffox :)
I have download it 3 times for the same machine.
(1.0. - 1.0.3)
I am sure others have done the same.
I got a cold splash in the face last week when i told my client they should be using firefox. They responed "what's firefox"
Its a little too early to break out the "IE is dead" champagne...
I hope it will happen someday but there is much more work to be done.
I can't wait for them to do it :)
or somebody on internet2 keeps clicking reload, for that next firefox update.
PJRC: Electronic Projects, 8051 Microcontroller Tools
It's bad that a quality piece of open source software is getting the recognition it deserves, because it will fall even faster than IE to surreptitious purveyors of spyware and virii taking advantage of the source to discover new ways to subvert our web browsers without our knowledge.
I never vote for anyone. I always vote against.
-- W.C. Fields
The large amount of downloads are great, but how many of those downloads simply were the same users downloading updates: v1.0, v1.0.1, v1.0.2 and v1.0.3? I'd be interested in knowing how many of those downloads correspond to unique users. After all, that's really what is most important.
Who's got real webserver stats with % FireFox vs IE, Safari, Mozilla, Netscape et al?
--
make install -not war
I was wondering what the market share is compared to IE? I am finding that IE is used so much because it is convenient and not because people haven't heard of Firefox. Once I show somebody firefox and what it can do, they realize the error of their ways.
Yesterday I ran the little 'check for updates now' deal and apparently there were some for firefox itself as it downloaded the whole installer, ran through the whole thing and reset my home page.
Do these downloads count? If so-- then every time there is an update you are really ramping up your numbers due to current users getting it.
It's hard to believe that's how Micronians are made. Why don't we see it right now by having you both kiss one another?
The interval between the counter changing is waaaaay too regular. You would think it would skip a number sometimes, but it's a steady uptick by one, at a steady interval...
"People" using "unnecessary" quotes should be "shot".
Shouldn't we send the person who did that download some flowers or balloons or something? Imagine being that guy, walking around town, "Yeah, that 50 millionth was me!" and everyone responding "Yeah, sure...". We should make it like the reward you get for being the 1,000th person to buy something in a new supermarket.
Developers: We can use your help.
.. considering that I aborted 100 downloads and finished 50 downloads over the time ...
I would have expected them to change the name after 50,000,000 downloads.
"Look Lois, the two symbols of the Republican Party: an elephant, and a fat white guy who is threatened by change."
It's worse than Newfoundland.
Given that we've had 3 downloadable releases since launch, 50,000,000 != number of users.
And if people are smart enough to download Firefox rather than use IE, then they're more likely to grab updates as they become available.
Lets not hype FireFox stats...Firefox kicks ass well enough without bullshit.
50,037,604
50,037,605
50,037,606
50,037,607
50,037,608
50,037,609
50,037,610
50,037,611
50,037,612
50,037,613
50,037,614
And it can't be a coincidence that the page doesn't display properly in Internet Explorer!!
The rise of Firefox is the best thing to happen in computing since the dawning of OSS.
"All great things are simple & expressed in a single word: freedom, justice, honor, duty, mercy, hope." --Churchill
if they lie about the counter, and cant make a counter properly, how do we know theyre telling the truth about 50 Million?
I just saw the counter go down. Cool, they're even counting "returns".
Actually, the javascript only updates once a minute, and when it does, it computes a new rate, so the increments you see are only estimates until the next update.
bp
I've updated FireFox on my in-law's Window's box three times now. Each time, the 'upgrade' consisted of downloading the new install executable to the desktop and running it.
The new installation overwrites the old one, keeping your various settings (history, bookmarks, etc.) in tact.
It would be interesting to find out how many of those downloads were resulting from the upgrade prompt (red arrow). Hopefully, that's already been factored in.
--- Dan
with a big fake check and a camera crew right now.
I just did b4 I saw this.
PETA - People Eating Tasty Animals!
It's probably more than 50M.
For example, we are using Debian on all of our workstations and we get FireFox as Debian package from Debian mirror, hence it's not counted by Mozilla's web site.
It was right around that time that i downloaded Firefox onto a customer's machine that i'm removing parasites from. :-D
Glad to be part of it.
do() || do_not();
I'd like to see stats from the major web properties like Google that show which browsers are hitting them.
I have firefox on three boxes (probably representing five downloads since I have upgraded once on two boxes).
I think the download number is a nice indicator, but downloads and usage are different animals and the latter seems more important in the long run.
I only came here to do two things; kick some ass, and drink some beer...looks like we're almost out of beer.
To(o) bad I need upped permissions to install it on Win2K.
Now who woulda thunk that one would need that to install a browser. Oh well, looks like these work machines are stuck with IE.
At this rate (about 2 downloads a second) they should reach 100,000,000 downloads by August 2006 or a little less than a year and a half from now.
Go go firefox!
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
Looking briefly round the source it isn't *exactly* real time; it loads the rss feed at http://www.spreadfirefox.com/download_counter.php? ff=1 , parses it, then increments from there in javascript. The automatic increment interval seems to be based on the real interval, so they shouldn't get too far off.
I mod down anyone who says "I will be modded down for this", regardless of the rest of their comment
For some reason when I'm watching the 'live' Firefox downloads it seems to be going at around about 7 downloads per second. I don't know if that's just my browser, or if they average the results...
I use the German-language Firefox from http://www.firebird-browser.de/. Am I included in this download count? What about other languages?
Uh oh, Firefox has instantaneously tracked down the user that clicked for the 50th million download ?
Along with coin #1 in the series, we are also awarding a very special prize--the biggest we've ever given out--to the lucky SpreadFirefox affiliate who delivered the golden click that went with the 50 millionth download. We have identified this person and will withhold her information until she accepts the prize. Check back early next week!
I wonder how they did it...
---
Return-path: 50thmillionfirefox@mpaa.com
Received: from catchthepirate.mpaa.com
Received: from mail.mpaa.com
Received: from some.isp.com
Subject: Firefox 50th million download
Hi, we are from spreadfirefox.com and have identified the 50th million firefox downloader as coming from ip UUU.XXX.YYY.ZZZ.
Please give us his/her name and address so we can contact him/her to give them this prize !
Thank you in advance,
Firefox team
Slashdot: stuff for news, nerds that matter, matter for news, stuff that nerd
Yea, but who is going to make ridiculous claims of swimming accross a large body of water this time?
Don't Tread on Me
Is anyone going to be swimming?
I'd say the whole Mozilla team should get in the water and head for Island.
Simpy
1. The market share
2. The community's active participation into the project.
I don't see what it brings to say there is '50.000.000' downloads, this is just marketing for the average user.
on Windows ME the factor would probably be around 15, so saying 50% windows ME boxes - we would get 30,000,000*0.5/15 = 1,000,000 unique downloads.
So accounting for 0.6(windows)*(0.5 ME + 0.3 XP) = 48% of downloads we actually only have 6,000,000 unique downloads due to instability problems with windows.
Of course I meant not 'greater' but 'bigger'...
the counter isn't exactly "real".
:
// The initial rate, in downloads/second.
Take a look at the code and you will see that it gets a seed from the server and calculates a rate:
if (last_time && time - last_time != 0) {
download_rate = calculate_rate(time, count);
tick_time = Math.round(1000.0 / download_rate);
} else {
download_rate = initial_rate;
tick_time = Math.round(1000.0 / download_rate);
}
It uses the rate so that the browser is somewhat accurate, but not truly.
Also of note, the default rate is 2.0/second
var initial_rate = 2.0;
I only came here to do two things; kick some ass, and drink some beer...looks like we're almost out of beer.
"May it go on swiftly to 100,000,000!"
Okay, I'll probably get modded out of the place for this but it's just a fucking browser, not the second coming. It doesn't give oral sex and it's not Half-Life fucking 2.
I've got it installed here and at work. I still end up using IE most of the time, to be honest. I only notice a difference when I'm trying to sort out my Stylesheets so they work on both browsers (and IE really needs to sort its shit out there).
Long may FireFox continue because IE's quality really began to dip when Nutscrape disappeared. A bit of competition is healthy but for most browsing IE does the same job just as well...
For those of you complaining that the number is an overestimate because of multiple versions, reinstalls, etc. Think about this:
How many office admins, husbands, wives, friends etc. have burned a copy of firefox onto disk or keep a copy on a thumdrive and have used this to install on more than one machine? Think about it. Before the Internet, millions of people had applications that were downloaded nonce.
Quantity is not the measure for quality.
Does 50,000,000 include the separate downloads of 1.0.1, 1.0.2, and 1.0.3?
$8.95/mo web hosting
Let's have its CEO swim 50 cross-atlantic laps!
The counter works by checking the real number occasionally, and then interpolating with a steady rate between these numbers. It should never be off by too much - the people who complain about a 500 variation - this is 0.001% error - not too big really.
On the flip side, even though I have downloaded it a few times, I've also burned the exe to a disk and installed it on the boxes of several friends. That's multiple installs for one download.
The other scenario is probably much more common, but it could go both ways.
Sweet informative mod.
Their work is a daily sojourn to the underworld. Gillespie has a team of 10 men and six women who spend hours in front of their computers, extracting leads, writing warrants and sifting photos for clues. The payoff is the day they get to kick down a door and take the "bad guy" away. The mood is light and the humor often off-color to ease the horror.
f g-photo27apr27.story
On one wall is a "Star Trek" poster with investigators' faces substituted for the Starship Enterprise crew. But even that alludes to a dark fact of their work: All but one of the offenders they have arrested in the last four years was a hard-core Trekkie.
Det. Constable Warren Bulmer slips on a Klingon sash and shield they confiscated in a recent raid. "It has something to do with a fantasy world where mutants and monsters have power and where the usual rules don't apply," Bulmer reflects. "But beyond that, I can't really explain it."
That is one of the biggest challenges of the Child Exploitation Section's work. They need to get inside the minds of the victims and the perpetrators to find them, but there is only so far they can -- or want to -- go.
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-
Survey says [schwing!]
I've had a for(;;;) loop running since day one!
because someone at mozilla doesnt understand what autoupdate means
when i see numerous firefox executables scattered over my clients/family's desktops i cringe with embarrasment
Now. The counter you see there is a Javascript box, similiar to Gmails space indicator. It ups the count once a second then takes the actual result using XMLHTTPRequest just like Google Maps does.
Also, they clearly state somewhere(too tired to look up) that they don't count the downloads which result from the Auto Update mechanism.
Now, these results are not terribly accurate. It's great for those of us who enjoy using Firefox and who advocate that people use it and so forth. It's gratifying to see that there is further competition in the browser market - as it is W3C guidelines are slowly being followed more and more. Now, this is a Good Thing(tm), a boon to people who enjoy designing to standards rather than to browser quirks.
R.
Now I see :)
Ah well, it wasn't meant as a critical comment :)
Slashdot: stuff for news, nerds that matter, matter for news, stuff that nerd
Oh wait... they don't fly anymore, because they kept crashing into the audience.
Yet, given that Microsoft has endured a cesspool of forgiveness throughout the lifetime of Windows(TM); considering 1,2,3.11,95,98,ME,2000,XP, and now Longhorn; I think the same should be accounted to the BSOD Angels of the USAF. Therefore; I, for one, welcome the return of our Blue Flights of Death Angel overlords!
That Opera did something memorable too recently...?
:)
Oh well, can't matter much. Way to overshadow !!!
The price is always right if someone else is paying.
Received? 'Delivered' is the word you might have been looking for.
Barrier? Barrier to what? Perhaps you were thinking of 'milestone'?
I've downloaded Firefox lots of times, but I'm stuck with the 1.0 PR 1 release because GTK1 support no longer works (or was dropped) in all subsequent releases; my work machine is a RedHat 7.3 box with no chance of upgrade anytime soon.
Each of the source releases since 1.0 PR 1 also include a number of non-GTK related issues that would prevent a successful build; perhaps newer distros include a version of 'make' that can deduce the correct paths for various include files that, while in the source archive, are unlocatable during the build. Is anyone working to make sure that the documentation "./configure; make; make install" actually works?
I'd quit casting asperions on the source releases if someone more skilled at wrangling Firefox source than I could point me to a successful build of the most recent source release on an RH7.3 system.
eskwayrd = m^2c^4
I've downloaded Firefox several times myself, sometimes to the same machine running the same version. Then there are the times I downloaded v1, v1.01, v1.02, and v1.03. So do those count as separate downloads? They shouldn't. I'd have stuck with v1 had there not been security fixes that I felt needed patching. 50M is a pretty high number. Also, I'd like to know the breakdown by OS.
Slashdot hits its 50,000,000th dupe story count
that's due to the fact that you are looking through two different quantum tubes through each machine... and one of the sites is a few minutes in the future.
normally you can percieve these effects, but open source is entirely different.
-pyrrho
My roommate (now ex-roommate) left for that long drive to Texas a couple of days ago. His room only had the bed, the wooden chair next to it, a cordless phoneset, and wha--what's this? It's the DSL modem he had to leave behind.(/me looks at camera with mocking smile).
Now, let's see. THis gazinta here, and minutes later, I started d/loading off that fast pipe. Quicktime! Batman trailer! Windows Media PLayer 9! (I know, that's just plain sick!) And finally, at least, for that night, FIREFOX! I was on fire! Wooops! THe lights just went out! Power is down? But my deck was still chugging! DIdn't lose it, Scotty! What's this? Log in to internet? Hey the password is still there! Talk about pirate internet!
His room now only has the bed, the wooden chair next to it, and a cordless phoneset.
I wasn't quite sure what to download next, but I am sure that I will think of something...
(this was only a teaser, the film is not yet rated)
If only I had printed out three pages of paper and stuck them the back of my car first
According to the website, Jon had to turn back. He was swimming with his PR manager who was in a raft, but after the raft sprung a leak Jon had to rescue him, sadly ending his Atlantic crossing in the meantime.
Quite a funny writeup, my favourite:
"As much as I don't want to talk behind a colleague's back, there is no doubt that we would never have let Eskil assist Jon in the raft had we known he can neither swim nor read maps," says an embarrassed Tor Odland, Opera's Communications Director.
Does this count everytime that I have to update by downloading an entirely new version every few weeks?
You guys did a slashdot effect on all of those pictures. and now I can't get the main site bck, either. In less than.... 50 minutes after the story was posted, according to my time. Is that a new record?
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I thought the count was too even a tempo to reflect people hitting a download. I hit refresh page and the number jumped back a few and continued counting.
Still Cool that the download number is essentially what is shown.
I don't think that will happen, for several reasons:
Raise your children as if you were teaching them to raise your grandchildren, because you are.
Popup blocking is a standard feature these days. It's hardly something that is worth advertising as a reason to switch to Firefox - I haven't tried any efforts from Microsoft for a while, but I'm sure even they have it by now.
I'll probably be modded down for this...
The one complaint I have against it (and I just can't find a logical reason as to why this should happen) is that almost every time I use FireFox I end up with an inactive/dead pixel on my IBM Thinkpad and it lasts until I reboot the machine. This is something that does not happen when I use IE. My ATI Radeon display drivers are upto date and so I think of a reason as to why this should happen. As long as I use IE, there is no dead anything - except possibly my soul!
Not that all this makes a difference to the way I feel about my fovorite browser.
Much to my delight, I discovered that Firefox displayed the pages without a hitch using the proxy I had setup. Around 4am on a Monday morning I deployed Firefox to my 50 some end users, dropped an email telling them to use Firefox to access the Web. Even imported their IE settings.
I fixed the IE descrency about a week later, then proceeded to walk around and notify people they could go back to using IE...no body wanted to use it...matter of fact, some became almost violent when I offered to return their default browser to IE.
I recommend telling everyone that IE is broke on their networks, and deploying FF. You could even "mysteriously" break IE in you proxy settings... :)
Updating process is a little annoying, but the no spyware benifits absolutely outweighs it.
to pay for it. Maybe 1/50th of 50 million downloads?
Since going to Gnome, I've ended up using galeon.
It has proper session support, it has proper theme support, and it solved my flash slowdown issues with certain sites that I've always had in FF.
I initially read that that was a gtk2 bug, but later read it was due to an XUL overhead issue.
The other gnome browser, epiphany, is also an option and the default gnome, I just found galeon more feature complete instead of the minimalist approach of epiphany.
Anyway, it's all gecko with just different packaging. And there's also that Kmelon one on the windows side. So I wonder what that would bring the downloads with considering all gecko browsers. Obviously pretty hard to keep track of in linux when one rarely downloads from the actual site.
Way to pay attention to current events.
You receive an F for effort!
haha
"downloads" is a pretty crappy metric. i think i speak for all anonymous cowards when i say i'd be more interested to know how many updates have been downloaded.
What exactly makes 50,000,000 a barrier? And does this barrier only apply to open source browsers or is a general barrier?
I'm not sure about per user, but it comes out to (to two decimal places) 291,566.44 downloads per day, or 3.37 downloads per second!!!
Why not go to a billion, or six billion, or even 42 billion?
I don't think they should be happy until every man, woman, and child on earth is running seven copies of Firefox, whether or not they own a computer!
Serving your airship needs since 1995.
Ok, so you have the people who keep copies of FF on thumbdrives, web servers, etc. You also have people who download full versions just for upgrading. I say one pretty much cancels the other out, so it's not something you really have to worry about. Besides that, 50 million downloads ALONE shows that the browser is beginning to catch on. The general public will see it as friends pass it to friends. Just because some people haven't heard of it yet doesn't mean it's a failure, it just means it has further to spread. So if you believe in it, then do your part.
... CEO Jon S. von Tetzchne continues to prepare to drown a ridiculous and cold death in the north Atlantic Ocean.
RP
http://www.infocraft.com/projects/ffcounter/
All the inner workings are described there.
--Enjoy!
Let n be the number of Firefox hits per day on some fairly popular site like Google, Yahoo, whatever, which will vary by date, d.
Let D be the number of downloads of Firefox up to a certain date, d.
Then, is it true that
IOW, are these downloads by users equally serious and intent upon using Firefox as the early adopters?"Provided by the management for your protection."
Bill Gates walked into the IE development department and fired 25 of them. I think Mr Bill is not to be messed with. New Ad campaign, get the Facts on Firefox, it has a higher TCO and will not work with Live Meeting.
Your Average Joe
So I went to the page, and it said "actual number". I thought, how neat. Then I noticed how regular this was. Hmmmm. Might not be really the "actual" number.
So I did a test.
I unplugged my laptop's network wire. Turned off the wireless.
Know what happened? Number kept incrementing.
Actual number? No. Cheap javascript trick? Yeah.
Guys, when you want to say actual number, please, actually mean "actual number". Leave being disinguenous to your competitors.
"Today at 16:59 GMT (8:58 AM PST) ..."
The 50 millionth download went to Britain. The mismatch is due to the network latency when the file was transfered to GMT.
paintball
Does it have a way to count the number of people who will install it, check out out, find out that their bank site won't work with it and promptly UN-Install it?
Karma means nothing to me, so suck it...
The counter syncs with the "actual number" every 60 seconds, which means it will never be more than a couple hundred downloads off at any given time, and in fact it's usually very accurate once it's been running for a minute. Surely you don't expect us to poll our servers every tenth of a second, right?
Given the inherent margin of error with the "ACTUAL actual number," and the fact that we're dealing with a number as high as 50 million downloads and a delta as low as about 200, our consciences are quite clean labelling this the "actual number." We average around 240 downloads/minute.
Somehow I don't think we'd have linked to the page that describes exactly how the counter is implemented in the footer of the letter if we were trying to hide that information.
[sarcasm]The more popular FF gets, the more of a target will become for all the slimeball spyware/adware/ect. out there. C'mon, can't us geeks keep ONE GOOD THING to ourselves?!?[/sarcasm]
Although I say this tongue in cheek, as I reread it, it does make some scary sense...
Face it, do something enough times, and it can cause problems.
It is on its way. My mother was asking about internet saftey last month, if there was anything she should do, and I said "use firefox" amongst other things.
"Oh, I've heard of that" she said. She is not at all computer literate (still has a bit of trouble with the mouse, files, etc) but somehow she's at least heard that there is more than the big blue E.
There is hope.
(yes, she found the move painless, and has had no trouble at all with firefox)
Did anyone notice the typo?... it says 'ugprades', instead of 'upgrades.
So you want them to track users?
I've been using Firefox as my main browser since it was Phoenix 0.5...loved it then, love it now. I'm concerned however that as its popularity grows, so does the backlash. MS didn't use to be evil. If I remember correctly, MS was the rising, new, exciting thing ten years ago.
But may Firefox 1.1 come out very soon. CSS3 outline is coming with it, I've heard, and I cannot WAIT to test that out.
It's funny to see the Microsoft Apologists come out of the woodwork, trying to explain away this amazing milestone.
Meanwhile, Microsoft has been announcing nothing but vapourware on their supposedly fantastic ie 7 browser.
IE is dead in the water, going nowhere fast.
This is no joke, I really do not feel the need for Firefox to be on my computer, but when I find certain sites questionable, then I download Firefox because chances are they are not exploiting it...
yeah.. just use your browsers refresh button and watch the numbers count from were they last started. I watched it cound the same number over and over again by hitting the refresh button.. kinda lame, great idea, but very lame. it should only show downloads that complete and when they complete count the number.
Obama = Socialism.
http://www.spreadfirefox.com/download_counter.php? ff=1
-
Copyright 2005 Mozilla Foundation
Fri, 29 Apr 2005 16:32:01 PST
Mozilla Firefox Download Count
http://www.spreadfirefox.com/
Spread Firefox
-
Firefox
50,105,470
For factual reasons.
I don't get as excited about technology as I used to (part of getting older I guess; or maybe it just because I've been exposed to so much poorly executed "technology"), but there are some very definite reasons to champion and love the Mozilla foundation and firefox specifically.
Besides being stable, fast and more standards compliant, the most notable thing that firefox has brought forward in my mind is that plug-in architecture doesn't just have to be about installing mal-ware on somebody's machine. Firefox is the first browser that I've run across recently where the plug-in add-on has 1) advanced rapidly and 2) are truely useful. I personally don't remember the last time I ran across and honest to god useful plug-in for IE and I was compelled to seek out and install.
The next most significant reason to use and love firefox is that it forces content makers to be vendor neutral. How many time have you heard that bullshit argument that it's OK for a web site to be IE specific "because that's what 98%" of the market uses. Well, I'm here to tell you those days are over and firefox is the reason why. You can either be part of the solution or you can be part of the problem. Choose life, freedom and the pursuite of happyness over vendor lock-in and all that it entails.
As a techie, I love firefox for some other reasons that the average user might not recognize as reasons to love firefox. When I come upon an spyware infested computer at work and somebody asks me to "make it work again", I can quickly download firefox, install it, import IE settings and send them down the path of rightousness and hope in less than 3 miniutes. I can't count the number of times users have been prevented from logging into a web site because their pop-up blocking spyware that automajicly installed itself decided that the login popup didn't need to be presented to the user... Or users who can't download shockwave because it requires pop-ups... or users who experience IE bringup the script debugger dialouge over and over and over because some domain admin through that those registery settings would somehow improve the security of IE and make the IE user experience even better that it already isn't. I love the fact that firefox is under constant development (you don't like the speed with which it's being developed, make a hefty contribution to the Mozilla foundation or just pull down the source and compile it yourself), rather than being on some for odd form of patch-cycle life support because it have the browser equivalent of AIDS.
I love the fact that firefox tells you itself if it needs to be updated (not through windows update, which, BTW, most day job organizations block at the firewall).
I haven't even begun to scratch the surface of why *EVERYONE* that cares about the future of the internet and their personal computer use experience should be using firefox, but suffice it to say the resasons for choosing firefox (over IE in particular) are *THAT* fundamental.
This, my friends, is NOT jihad (it's NOT about ideology). This is the American Revolution (firefox is about freedom).
Good stuff.....
...the overwhelming majority of users STILL use IE6, a 3+ year old browser.
NOYCE!!!
----- Open Source = More Secure (mmmmkay)
I was downloading Firefox and exactly 8:58am!
So, what do I win?
Enjoy!
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
SRC_URI is the original source, so that the ebuild will work seamlessly even if the mirrors haven't be updated. My build downloaded from ${GENTOO_MIRRORS}/distfiles/firefox-${MY_PV}-sourc e.tar.bz2 -- which expands to http://mirror.datapipe.net/gentoo/distfiles/firefo x-1.0.3-source.tar.bz2
Well, not quite, because GENTOO_MIRRORS is a space-separated list of mirrors. It'll try the above pattern with each of the GENTOO_MIRRORS, then it'll try SRC_URI if all of them fail.
Actually, Gentoo has as many mirrors as anyone else. Something like 20 or 30. They update automatically from the official ebuilds, which are updated through rsync mirrors.
And, I have a polipo proxy that's used to connect to those servers. So each of the four boxes in this house that downloaded Firefox was counted once by the Gentoo mirror (if that was counted), and the gentoo mirror was only counted once by the Firefox download page. In fact, there may even be one central mirrors that the others replicate from, so there may only be a single tally for all Gentoo Firefox builds.
Maybe they should count by new installs, not downloads? Maybe by setting the homepage to point to somewhere on Mozilla.org, but have it change as soon as that page loads successfully?
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
I know that it's a Microsoft product, but if they could make a widget that would read and process the RSS feed, it would be super cool to have your stats pop up anytime.
Running 1.0.3 here, and having upgraded to it in the last week, I am quite miserably unhappy to see the SAME RIDICULOUS cpu eating and memory hole problems exist. Why is everyone so excited about a browser that needs to be 'rebooted' every 15 mins if you want it to remain responsive ? I'm trying to do something VERY simple: go to some Japanese BBS'es and collect a few jpegs. Said Jpegs each pop open in a new window. Each time I open a save dialogue it gets progressively slower -- and slower -- and within 30 mins my machine is crawling with 300 megs of ram EATEN and 90% CPU going to fucking firefox. FUCK FIREFOX I SAY.
Yesterday I tempted fate -- I am sick of bookmarking every GOD DAMNED THING just so I can reload it after rebooting the browser... So I kept going -- ignoring the slowness... Until finally BECAUSE OF FIREFOX, my CPU overheated, and the entire laptop instantaneously shut-down for safety.
I got a cold splash in the face last week when i told my client they should be using firefox. They responed "What's firefox?"
Look it up on Wikipedia. "What's that?"
Well, try Google. "What's that?"
You, know "search" on the internet. "Internet???"
What do you DO with your computer?" "Computer???"
What you are typing on and looking at! "My typewriter and TV???"
Firefox 1.0.3 reaches 50 crashes on my computer in a single day...
This sucks. Whenever I install more than 3 extension the whole thing goes to hell, and then I have no idea who's to blame/where to file the bug report.
Instead of wasting their time on SVG development and sh1t like live bookmarks the firefox team should focus on stabilizing their application with its 10 top extensions and plugin. I want to argue in favor of this browser to my friends, but this version makes it very difficult.
The power of Christ compiles you!
...the counter is dead blank under Firefox 1.0.3, FC3, latest stable kernel (I'm not trying to remember the digits at this late hour). Comes up on WinXP. Well, that's 1/2 point for the non-MS world.
If my grammar and spelling are off, I am [distracted/tired/careless] (take your pick)
Why is 50,000,000 downloads such an accoplishment whereas 49,999,999 is not?
Underneath the counter:
"(actual number, does not include ugprades)"
James
http://www.reeb.freeserve.co.uk