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!"
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.
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.
Does anyone actually know how many visits slashdot gives a site that is on posted on the front page? any guesses?
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?
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.
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.
just take a look at the source code and you will see that i caches stuff etc: http://www.infocraft.com/projects/ffcounter/
IAAL
Does anyone actually know how many visits slashdot gives a site that is on posted on the front page? any guesses?
I'd say about 50,000,000 hits.
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
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
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
All I want to know is who's going to be swimming with Opera's CEO across the atlantic.
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
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.
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.
I've had a for(;;;) loop running since day one!
Sadly, Opera's CEO's swim across the Atlantic ended early.
http://opera.com/swim/
It looks like you are downloading the same file 50 times.
Do you need help downloading??
I don't read your sig. Why are you reading mine?
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
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
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
If only I had printed out three pages of paper and stuck them the back of my car first
Actually if you open the same page in a second tab (or window if that is your thing) you will see the numbers are different. As time goes on however they slowly synchronize just to turn around and differ again and so forth. The counter apparently just has some fancy mechanics behind it.
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?
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.
This is probably way redundant by now, but here goes anyway...
The interval between the counter changing is waaaaay too regular.
That's because it is regular. Check out the source. It periodically checks the current real number through XML, resets the counter to that number, then adjusts the estimated interval that the counter should use until the next update.
You didn't really expect them to have a gazillion clients constantly polling some poor server somewhere to catch each and every single download, did you?
Hmmm... the Blue Angels are *Navy* - not Air Force. That's the Thunderbirds. And they don't crash into the audience - I think you're thinking of an airshow in Europe somewhere.
(Windows, on the other hand, *does* crash everywhere...)
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.
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.
Ooops, wrong language. :)
That would be Iceland.
Simpy
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
It really depends on the kind of article. The "Christmas Light" guy claim about 100 000 hits from a front page post.
From personal experience, posting somewhat technical biology related news, I had about 2-3000 hits.
Eureka Science News - automatically updated
"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.
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...
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.
...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.
That's got to be the first time I've heard linear interpolation described as "fancy!"
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
Dear Slashdot Users:
Even though Firefox downloads continue to climb everyday, with no sign of stopping, and the recent rampant of spyware attacks all seemingly coming from Internet Explorer vulnerabilities, I'd like to officially annount that Microsoft still does not feel Firefox is a threat to Internet Explorer.
Also, our friends in the advertising world are very upset that Firefox has many built-in and 3rd-party plugins to block ads. That goes against the Internet weay, where pop-ups "pay" for your Internet access, and everyone used Internet Explorer without questioning authority.
I'd once again like to state that Firefox is not a threat to IE dominance, even though it is sinking faster than Elijah Wood's career after LOTR. We have some new feature's planned for IE in the near future, including the ability for executables to install on your system without asking you, even if you have ActiveX turned off and you're only logged in as Guest. We feel this will enhance the spread of genuine 3rd-party apps that enhance the Internet "shopping" experience. Also, we may finally include that fabled Tabbed Browsing myth that I keep hearing about. I would have to take your word on it since, like my blind Christian faith and fear of homosexuals, I only use Internet Explorer and would never *think* of using anything else.
Even though IE is only for Windows, this dominance includes Mac OS X and Linux. Even though Firefox is available for pretty much all platforms and IE is generally only for Windows, we feel it's unnecesary to even consider Mac OS X, Linux, Solaris or BSD as alternative operating systems, since Windows is, let's face it, the only operating system. And it's the operating system God would use... even though his computer is a Mac. But obviously the Homosexual Agenda has gotten to him first.
Your's Truely
Steve Vamos
President Of Microsoft's In-Denial Department
P.S. I hear MSNBC is a better source of tech niews than Slashdot.
The inbound Slashdot data, along with that from the other sites, is accurate - no hoax.
alek (aka Mr. Christmas Lights)
Hulk SMASH Celiac Disease
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.
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)
Haha, didn't expect you to respond.
I was more of joking about your data being a hoax.
Good job on the "lights" and nice report on your traffic. Any update on if your setting up your interactive light for real this time?
I'm a virgo and on Slashdot. Coincidence? Yes.
Underneath the counter:
"(actual number, does not include ugprades)"
James
http://www.reeb.freeserve.co.uk