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Firefox Growth Slowing?
ninja_assault_kitten writes "Silicon.com has an interesting article on the apparently slowing growth of Firefox. To quote the article, 'The slackening of Firefox's growth could mean that the browser has converted a substantial proportion of its natural constituency, thought to be early adopters and the technically savvy. It could also show that the browser's widely publicised security flaws have begun to undermine the foundation's argument that people should switch from IE to be safer.' One thing's for sure, with the release of 1.0.3 and now 1.0.4 we can probably expect to breach the 80 million download mark shortly."
It seemed like the publication of those security flaws came from Mozilla itself... and a fix was out in about a week.
Who tells us about IE flaws and how long does it take for them to get fixed?
Simple Machines in Higher Dimensions
It could also show that the browser's widely publicised security flaws have begun to undermine the foundation's argument that people should switch from IE to be safer.
Um... I don't think that's it. While the security flaws might be causing some to think twice, the real issue is market saturation. There does not exist a desktop computer sold in the last 10 years that didn't come with a web browser. They are essentially entering a 100% saturated market. Nonetheless, I think their accomplishments are stunning.
50ish? whenever I fix a spyware infested machine, first thing added is SP2, second is firefox
Douglas P. Price
Could it be that Firefox users are blocking marketing firm WebSideStory's tracking images? These guys are just as evil as DoubleClick in assembling a massive database of information on web users' browsing history. Wouldn't ignorant IE users be more likely to allow WebSideStory to track them?
meh, this comes up in every firefox discussion. Yes, no doubt many people download firefox more than once. But there are also those of use who carry it on a usb key\cd\share\whatever and install it multiple times from a single download (I do so myself.) So what's your point? The fact is number of downloads, while no doubt not accurate, are still a good indication of the popularity of it.
Also, for anyone who thinks updates of firefox count as another download (as someone always seems to bring up in these discussions as well), they don't.
Personally I install it on any friends or familys computers that require my support. Its part of the price for free tech support.
If I find they have been using IE they get a 1 strike & they're out. If I find they have been using it a second time.
"Sorry, my time is more important to me & I prefer not to keep fixing the same ol' same ol'"
Go Away! Not for Sale
and disingenuous posters
I'm pretty sure all those downloads(+20 of them) count in on that 80 million.
And so what? A download total number (used for marketing) is essentially used as a "vote of confidence". If you liked the browser enough to not only install each version as it came out, but install each of those on multiple machines, then Hell Yes it's a "vote of confidence" and should count towards the Total Number.
I use Safari, and could really give shit about how many downloads Firefox, Mozilla or frickin' IE get. What I do know is that you're trying to somehow dilute the legitimacy of the number of downloads when your very multi-downloads were an endorsement of the quality of this product.
You know what?
Simple version: if you used the Firefox upgrade mechanism, they don't.
IIRC, it's slightly more complicated than that. Even so, the number is incredibly hard to guess: lots of people download more than once, and lots of people (think office rollouts or the like) download only once fore many machines. It's a guesstimate, and even if it were a good guesstimate it still is pretty meaningless, since it doesn't take into account how much people actually use the browser.
One of the people on http://planet.mozilla.org/ had a good post on this recently (that I can't find right now), what I've said here is pretty much a ripoff of my memory of what they said.
There are 11 types of people in the world: those who can count in binary, and those who can't.
For once, I'd like to actually see some empirical evidence.
Every mega-corporation hires it's own sub/pseudo company to do an "audit" of the market saturation/absorbtion rate.
Much like politics, it's not newsworthy to report that candidate X has lost +/-4 points. Let's see what browser the people choose.
Unlike the US election, I'm sure that the people will make the right decision (when it affects them directly - [ex. No Popups, No Spyware, No viruses, etc.]).
People may be stupid and they should be guided, but they should never be abused or manipulated.
Don't think that a small group of dedicated individuals can't change the world. It's the only thing that ever has.
People that say the "taskbar is my tabs" make me laugh.
Seriously... try some tabbed browsing... even if you just buy an addon for IE... you should really try it.
Using the taskbar makes a mess when you are doing more than just browsing the web. All of your websites get mixed in with your regular programs. Tabbed browsing keeps everything nice a neat. You can also browse a lot faster (Run down slashdot middle clicking on the interesting links then just close off tabs as you read them... much better than click a link... read.... click back... click a link... read).
Just try it already.
Friedmud
Village idiot in some extremely smart villages.
Downloads are a good indication of popularity by what metric? Oh, I forgot, popularity is by definition the metric of last resort. In Soviet Russia, Natalie Portman's grits are popular.
What you meant, if you had turned on your brain, is that total downloads are the best available proxy on Firefox's broad-based mindshare. The other proxy available, user agent strings reported to web servers, is a better proxy on page views. But even this proxy is weak, since it fails to account for a wide range of caching effects. Anyone extrapolating short-term trends based on these metrics would be challenged to outperform fortune cookies.
Yeah, and none of my downloads counted at all as I get them straight from the Debian repositories.
Dear Coward, /. and uses Firefox. I'm the reason why the downloads are plateuing for FF. Your anti-Apple rhetoric hasn't convinced me to try FF. Would you like to try the nice approach?
First, I don't care about Apple and KHTML, as long as my browser works well. If Apple has done something bad, then shame on them. But I really don't give a shit if KHTML guys are pissed about the code not being paid forward by Apple; maybe they give a shit but not me. And guess what I am? I'll tell you what; I'm more of a typical user than the uber-geek that frequents
Oh, and a "vote of confidence" isn't "utterly worthless". It's how most things in this world are decided on. Word-of-mouth advertising kicks the shit out of, six ways from Sunday, regular, invade-your-space advertising.
You know what?
When people advertise that their application has had so many downloads, many people assume that that number equals the number of users. Never have I ever heard of that number being directly correlated to "user confidence" (if at all, only indirectly but the number of users). In the case of Firefox, the number has the potential of being a multiple of the actual number of users. Not only do people download it multiple times for different computers, each computer downloads it multiple times for every patch. It is easy to see how people could misinterpret these numbers to mean something that they don't. Anyway, not calling anyone a liar or a bad person, so don't get your panties in a bunch. :)
The big picture is that people are realizing there are viable alternatives to Microsoft products, and they are using those alternatives. For a long time it was essentially IE reigning supreme, and now there are a variety of alternatives, with Firefox leading the pack and picking up new users by the millions.
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
Yea I'll troll: if MSIE didn't have all those exploits FF would have browser share equal to netscape today.
Bugs which annoy me (YMMV):
- After some browsing FF windows may stop redrawing (including browse buttons)- you need to resize/scroll down or restart windoze. All other progs work just fine.
- Java don't work here on my FF. Works in msie, Opera and standalone. Maybe I just have too many different java installs. No biggie but occasionally I just have to fire msie (I noticed almost everyone using FF *HAS TO* go msie for some sites and it is not only for activex stuff)
- http authentication is a mess - FF don't understand there can be more then one authentication within one url (it just seems to remember one set of user/pass per url)
- FF grabs wrong icons for sites occasionally.
- worst bug I stumbled upon twice: if you happen to hard-reset a comp with FF open you may lose all your bookmarks.
- FF wants to save everything in same directory. How about remembering where I last saved pics, html or zip/tar files? How about title of document becoming saved file name? msie is a bit better about that.
There are some nice features, sure. Personally I don't care about tab browsing. I love being able to search within wikipedia or IMDB. I love developer plugin and DOM inspector. But for today FF is still ridden with bugs annoying the shit out of me.And my point is? You can't expect everyone to love FF as it is. And you can expect (fear?) MS will learn a lesson and top FF. Let's be more humble and critic about FF and less in love with its success, please. Remember, FF success lies more in msie bugs then in FF greatness.
I very much dislike it when a company engages in phony accounting. Can you imagine if Microsoft claimed each patch download as a new sale of Windows? Likewise, I dislike it when people misrepresent facts.
Hitting 80 million downloads is not as impressive as it sounds when a lot of those downloads are because FF does not have a patch infrastructure in place.
Please try not to misrepresent. Yes it's true, FF may be downloaded 80 million times, but a certain percentage of those downloads are users upgrading a minor revision, which is effectively downloading a patch.
The Mozilla foundation is not (or should not be) interested in maximizing the number of downloads of the software, but maximizing the number of happy users of their software. That's how they will accomplish their mission: "The mission of the Mozilla project is to preserve choice and innovation on the Internet." ref: http://www.mozilla.org/about/
Saying the recent security flaws in Firefox is causing people to stay with IE is like saying people would rather drive a Ford Pinto because they realized that BMWs aren't completely safe. No one with an ounce of intelligence said Firefox is completely safe. The advantage to Firefox and OSS in general is the process. There's a great deal more transparency. If Firefox has a bug, at least I would know about it and can take actions on my own initiative to mitigate it. With non-OSS software, however, I'm at the mercy of the people who wrote the software.
EvilCON - Made Famous by
Firefox is just coming off of a growth spurt.
Most things do not grow evenly through their whole life. Firefox grew explosivly in part due to the Wall Street Journal ad and a lot analysts pushing the security benefits. Now that there's been an equal amount of noise about the near-trivial exploit, people are getting cold feet.
I mean, some of the people who were considering switching are now asking about the exploit. One that did switch is asking how hard it is to switch back.
I say that it's a theoritical exploit that nobody has actually used to compromise a computer. If they're still listening, I add a joke contrasting IE's real world exploits. The news has hurt adoption rates of Firefox, but that's just because it's bad news, not because it's real.
People want to hear "Firefox is a pancea for all your ills", not "Every piece of software can have problems". Expect Firefox growth to pick up again after people don't remember this recent bug, and expect a few people to remember this bug years from today.
----
Evil will always win because good is dumb. -- Spaceballs.
With Firefox, updates are full downloads. While it may be a vote of confidence to you, to most people it's just another way to lie with statistics. An update initiated by an automatic popup dialog shouldn't hold as much weight as a a user grabbing Firefox for the first time.
Installing on multiple systems, or multiple partitions on a single system, when only ONE person is using it, shouldn't count either. This is just another example of "padding the books". It may be an endorsement to you, but we're not talking about fscking endorsements, we're talking about downloads! If shoving a copy on a thumbdrive to take to work to install there doesn't count, then being *lazy* and downloading twice shouldn't count either.
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
Guess what. There's no real way to tell, because your multiple downloads show up but my running around installing it off a USB drive or a local mirror (that doesn't report stats back to Moz.org) doesn't. I happen to use the products based on their merits and don't worry about how many other people are using it. It's vaguely interesting to see how many people might be doing so and so people try to make a guess based on what information they have, which in the case of open source software doesn't necessarily reflect the numbers accurately.
OMG! Mixed with the other programs? You mean like the ones that are associated with that browser instance? Why would I want to group by program? I'd rather group by area. The best part of unix based windowing systems to me is that they offer multiple desktops, so I can group by what I'm doing rather than by arbitrary groupings like "web page" and "text editor."
You realize you can do both with a browser that supports tabs or MDI...you know, have one browser window for each desktop?
Been there; done that. The bar that holds the tabs reduces the height of the page view. I'll take a side taskbar over tabbed browsing any day.
In addition to the top or bottom, Opera lets you put the page bar (its tab bar) on the left or right, or hide it altogether. You can do the same for the rest of the toolbars, thus saving even more of your precious vertical space.
They could have said "reaches saturation point", but that doesn't make a sellable/clickable headline.
Let's not forget that is
a) 80 million, only assisted with a single ad and word of mouth
b) 80 million, DESPITE a pre-installed, um, "alternative"
c) 80 million that saw those features first that may or may not make it into IE7. Note that IE had been going stale for lack of competition - natural consequence of the MS approach to, um, "innovation".
d) 80 million that are not exposed to the bad and insecure excuse for a coding platform that is ActiveX.
e) 80 million that don't care on which platform they browse, which together with OpenOffice represents a good 90% of the end user community.
Now, the last one is where the threat to MS resides. Usability is very rapidly dissappearing as a distinguishing factor.
Insert
I pushed out Firefox at work (university). It on all the machines. I didn't make it manditory, though it did cross my mind.
Well lately, I am reconsidering. At this point I've deicded Firefox stays on all images, and I'll recommend people use it, but I'm not going to push it any harder.
Why?
Well the honeymoon is now over in regards to security. I know as well as anyone that OSS doesn't magically mean secure. Many programmers have an arrogance about them that they think all security bugs are perfectly obvious and if only THEY looked at the code they could get rid of them. No, if they were obvious, probably wouldn't be there in the first place. So you can have a ton of eyes, doesn't mean you are bug free.
Initally the low usage was enough to make it worth while. No one was tarrgeting it so who cares? Well now it's getting popular, and the bugs are rolling in. It's not a bad record at this point, but it's enough I want to see how it develops. It's also an increased concern since Firefox won't patch itself. Unfortunately we have no central patch system and it doesn't look like we'll be given money to get one any time soon. The only way things get patched is if they do it themselves, if we do it manually, or if we reghost the system.
So since Windows knows how to update itself, and thus IE gets updated as well, the only concern is that the bugs are patched before they can be exploited. With Firefox we need to worry that they are patched with enough time for us to get the patch out before there's exploits going around.
This is a real concern, and probably much larger than IE only sites. I haven't encountered one of those in ages, and I use Firefox as my exclusive browser at home and work. As of now the only pages it seems to have problems on are ones with embedded video and that's a FF problem, not a design one.
The security issue though, that's a concern. If FF doesn't learn to autopatch and if we start seeing exploits in the wild beofre or a short time after a patch, I'll probably have to pull it and go with Opera instead (our instution just secured a site license for Opera) or perhaps back to IE.
The security isn't much worry to geeks for personal systems, that can patch their own shit with minimal fuss, but it's worrysome to instutions where having to manual deal with a patch to 3rd party software can be a pain.
When assume that download counter at spreadfirefox.com counts updates. Well, it doesn't.
user@ubuntubox:~$ stfu This server is going down for shutdown NOW!
With Firefox, updates are full downloads. While it may be a vote of confidence to you, to most people it's just another way to lie with statistics.
Um, correct me if I'm wrong, but for it to be lying, wouldn't they have to say something like x million unique *users* rather than downloads? They call it a download because there's no easy way to differentiate unique users without forcing people to register or something... even then the statistics wouldn't be perfect.
When people advertise that their application has had so many downloads, many people assume that that number equals the number of users
If people assume, that is their own fault. The number that Firefox gives is number of downloads, nothing more, nothing less. Downloads is the only number they should give to the public. They don't know how many unique users are downloading the program. They don't take personal information (and if they did, people would question why they need that info for a free, open source browser. Especially us tin foilers here at slashdot), therefore, they can't give out exact user numbers, they best they could do is estimate. Downloads is the perfect statistic for them; It's honest, a great representation of how well their program has caught on, it's an impressive number, and it does show a good deal of "user confidence". Even if every person downloaded 10 copies of it, that's still 8 million people who trust it, enjoy it, use it frequently enough that they stay updated with every upgrade, put it on every computer they use regularly, and probably tell their friends/family/colleagues about, which is a grand vote of confidence in my book. Misinterpretation of the number is the fault of the (potential) user, all Mozilla/Firefox is doing is giving out the facts.
"Plans are for fools! Oglethorpe, the plutonian (Aqua Teen Hunger Force)
many people assume that that number equals the number of users.
Then they are fools. They clearly state it is the number of downloads and not the number of users.
Anyway, the number of users my be higher. I have personally installed firefox 30 or so times for at least 10 different people from a single install cd I bought from mozilla store. That counts as zero downloads.
-- MartinG To mail me: echo kewyjlcxyzvjfxbqwh | tr bcefhjklqvwxyz
Apple is NOT stealing KHTML. They are strictly following the license (GPL). They're releasing their changes as source code. The KHTML developers want them to use the CVS trunk, but from Apple's point of view, this would put Webcore under KDE's control; so they are maintaining their own base and releasing the changes. What do you think this is? Let's remember, too, that KDE hasn't always been ideologically pure (or do you forget why Gnome was created?).
Since the majority desktop OS is Windows and most computer users don't care which browser to use as long as their browser work (by that I mean, able to browse webpages with a few occassional spyware distractions and virus infection), what else besides IE do you expect them to use?
They don't care if their browser pass the Acid2 or not.
Even if Mozilla pumps out a kitchen-sink Firefox tomorrow, Microsoft will release the same thing the day after. What else do you think MS is releasing IE7 as an independent release before Longhorn?
However, once Linux gains ground on desktop computing (that remains to be seen, however), I think Firefox usage will grow tremendously.
I don't use Firefox. I have no real intention of switching to Firefox unless it develops some killer features that I find I am missing. And yet, I still care that it is popular. Why? Because I am using another W3C-standards compliant browser, and the more people not using IE, the more potential market share people lose just by designing an IE-only site. If designing an IE only site means that a company immediately loses 25% of their potential market, then they would be suicidal to do so, and this benefits me.
For this reason, I actually don't care if anyone uses Firefox, as long as a lot of people are perceived to use Firefox, which is why I don't mind potentially inflated user statistics in the least.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
OK, Beside the fact that your site is nerd/programming topics, it also uses terms like "Windoze" and has ancient advocacy crap about Direct3D vs OpenGL that only interests anti-Microsoft trolls. And yet you wonder why your IE stats are lower than normal.
Trivialize any security bug in OSS as no big deal and "theoretical". Call any MS bug horrible and say "OMG everyone should switch".
Doesn't anyone else find this hilarious?
No, you're the only one.
Most every MS bug has a real-life gaping security hole, and most of the time the code to exploit it is rolling through the 0-day exploit sites in no time.
So.. no, no one else finds it hilarious.
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