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.
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. --
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 :)
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."
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!!
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
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
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
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
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.
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
"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...
Maybe (gasp) because OSS works!!!
Back off Billy, your sily jedi mind tricks have no effect on me.
Changa hates change.
There are other considerations. What will the turnaround be on creating and approving spyware fixes? Even once they are available will ff be able to complete with ie/windows update for pushing fixes? Or worse again will there be a dependence on users to install updates? Don't expect such diligence on the part of My Parents(tm). And how much damage will be done in the meantime?
There's the argument that ff hasn't seen the spyware pain that ie has, and may not be equipped to deal with the issues. M$ has the experience, and subsequent versions of ie are getting smarter at dealing with these problems, not to mention their new anti-spyware tool.
Don't expect the 'open source' tag to make everything happy day. FF's popularity will bring it a nice slice of problems, and I fully expect to see the ff community following ie's lead on solving those problems.
I'm wrong and so are you.
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.
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.
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.
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.
... CEO Jon S. von Tetzchne continues to prepare to drown a ridiculous and cold death in the north Atlantic Ocean.
RP
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.