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."

Comments

Yeah

[dtfinch]

Ever since 1.0, FireFox has felt sluggish running on Linux. Its cpu usage is much higher than before, and goes to 100% when it's waiting for a server response. I've noticed this on both Ubuntu and CentOS, so it's not likely a distro-specific issue (unless they're shipping debug builds or something). I might end up switching to other Gecko based browsers like Galeon, Epiphany, or just the plain old Mozilla as none of them seem to be afflicted by this problem.

Also, I bet their counts don't include all the Linux distributions that now come with FireFox in their repositories. You used to need to download and install it yourself, which could explain at least a bit of the slowdown. That and the fact that even the tiniest FireFox vulnerabilities seem to make headlines.

Re:How many unique downloads?

[The_Wilschon]

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.

How about RPM installs? Does the one download it takes to make the binary RPM count as only one download? Because in that case, there are tons more Redhat, Mandrake^H^H^Hiva etc users who use firefox on a regular basis but have never in their lives downloaded it.