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!"
Probably no where near the number of users that have it from their FC2 and FC3 disks or by apt-get install firefox or emerge firefox. I'd guess it is close to even.
Paying taxes to buy civilization is like paying a hooker to buy love.
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
We're not counting downloads served by the Firefox update system. Neither are we counting the millions of downloads from download.com (they actually host Firefox as well) or from other download repositories. We're also not counting people who go directly to FTP without going through our "bouncer" tool (the app that directs you to the most appropriate mirror). There's lots we're not counting here. It's not meant to be a count of users. It's just a measure of how many people use our system to download Firefox.
- A
Shouldn't we send the person who did that download some flowers or balloons or something?
Actually, we're rewarding the members of the Firefox community who helped that guy find Firefox. The big prize will go to the Spread Firefox affiliate who delivered the click that coincided with the 50 millionth download. http://www.spreadfirefox.com/fifty.html
- A
Seeing as I am downloading it directly from portage, this will not be counted by their download counter. I guess that many of the other posters have forgotten this and have probably underestimated the number of unique users by excluding most Linux users.
I'll probably be modded down for this...
And it can't be a coincidence that the page doesn't display properly in Internet Explorer!!
Look here. This Page Is Valid XHTML 1.0 Strict! No conspiracy theories around here. Valid HTML is difficult to get looking right in IE.
If your download went through the URLs listed in these links, and you're not talking about using Firefox's built-in update service, then your download was probably counted. http://www.mozilla.org/products/firefox/all.html
If your download did not go through one of those links, then you aren't counted.
- A
If you look at the source, you'll see that it is actually pulling a real number from an RSS feed.
It then defaults to 2 downloads a second, incrementing the timer by that rate every second. When it grabs the feed again a minute later, it then uses the "real" rate of downloads from the first grab to the second grab and starts incrementing by that amount.
It then continues to do that for as long as the page is up.
So the number is real-ish.
You are in a maze of twisty little relative jumps, all alike.
I should add a minor correction, that page lists the current version, so if you got 1.0, 1.0.1, or 1.0.2 from similar links, you'll also be counted. All those links go through our mirror tool that distributes load across our dozens of mirrors. We're not counting downloads that don't go through that tool.
- A
We're not celebrating the person who made the download. We're celebrating the community and the specific community member who helped deliver that new user to Firefox. See the affiliate program at SpreadFirefox.com http://www.spreadfirefox.com/
- A
Does anyone actually know how many visits slashdot gives a site that is on posted on the front page? any guesses?
;)
The guy who did the Christmas and Haloween lights prank did a rather nice analysis on the incoming bandwidth from Slashdot and other media sites.
Pasted below is Slashdot's statistics:
5 min: 781
10 min: 1,604
1 hour: 11,699
2 hours: 21,651
4 hours: 35,895
8 hours: 53,720
24 hours: 90,607
2 days: 94,830
week: 98,054
month: 117,210
Take it with a grain of salt though...the analysis might be another hoax
I'm a virgo and on Slashdot. Coincidence? Yes.
Why do so many Gentoo users get this confused.
Gentoo does not host the packages that you download. They host the ebuilds and the ebuilds tell portage where to download the packages from.
So, you downloaded it directly from mozilla. Check the ebuild yourself if you don't believe me.
nil
This is what OneStat has to say.
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.