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?
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.
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.
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
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
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
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
Jules, a big point that you're missing is that this is a celebration for that community of active participants who have helped Firefox achieve these downloads. Are open source projects supposed to discourage their communities from celebrating milestones?
- 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.
This is what OneStat has to say.
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.
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.