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Firefox Downloads Reach 75 Million
WindozeSux writes "Today Mozilla Firefox has reached its 75 millionth download. The Mozilla staff find this a morale booster since recent security vulnerabilities have slightly lowered the browser's growth rate. 'We're beefing up the management on the project. The project is still very healthy. We're seeing continued corporate interest and have a lot of large organizations that want to do deployments,' said Chris Hoffman."
And today on publishing the article was yesterday.
Any chance that security patched versions could increase number of downloads?
This is a Good Thing. Not because everyone has to use Firefox instead of IE/Opera/Safari/whatever, but because this forces authors to create more standard compliant sites which work on multiple platforms.
Good stuff.
.: Max Romantschuk
What is the relevance of the number of downloads? Someone might download it 4 times to install it at his 4 PC an another might download it once and install it on his company's 200 stations.
What I mean is, is there some valuable component or application of Firefox that can be used by product or service companies beyond the basic browser application? IE, for example, is a modular browser component that can be reused in private applications. Linux is useful in a broad range of products/services that aren't simply desktop and server operating systems.
Is Firefox modular enough to break out valuable, reusable parts and implement something new out of them?
I use Firefox on most of my computers, so I'm responsible for about 5 of those 75 million downloads. 30, if they are counting each patch too.
Jesus saved me from my past. He can save you as well.
Chris Hoffman or.. Chris... Frenchman?
I sincerely hope so, because I'm well and truly sick of this sort of situation.
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
And guess what, Firefox is going to keep growing! Why? Because IE7 is a rubbish. Before you mod this flamebait, let me explain why. Here is a screenshot of IE7 beta. Examine it closely. Here are my issue with it:
Seriously, this looks like it was designed by an amateur software development team. This is meant to be the Firefox killer? Firefox is showing that a monopoly doesn't guarentee you a browser monopoly. Is IE7 going to stop the rot? I doubt it very much. Firefox looks and feels better. Hats off to the Firefox team.
Simon.
Where I am currently working at, they tried to get rid of all the firefox on all the systems. Even if you upgraded to current, they did not want anybody on it, unless you had a business reason. So what was the browser of choice? MSIE.
Funny thing is that in 6 months that I have worked here is the only time since 1993-94 that I have been on Windows. I have seen no less than 5 system be massively infected because of MSIE (in a group of 20). Huge amounts of work had to be discarded (can not have virus/spyware getting into this software), which probably cost this company no less than 100K (and that is just what I am aware of. I have heard that it happens here constantly).
Yet, they discard Firefox, which I heard that they can not prove infected even one system (but they can prove that those 5 system were through MSIE, and the sys ads think all the others were as well).
Insane.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
What makes people think that the discovered security vulnerabiliies and the slowing growth rate have anything to do with each other?
And when I install I from portage it is also not counted. In fact most Linux users are probably not counted, since most use things like apt-get, emerge, or whatever.
What is the relevance? It gives an idea of the popularity of the product. The number is big, and still increasing. That is all that matters.
I'll probably be modded down for this...
Don't worry.
With a huge corporation doing everything they can to support Firefox, how can it fail?
The day MS changes its tactics I may start to worry.
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
this guy is totally spamming here.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Keep it simple.
The biggest danger to Firefox is that you forget the key reasons people like this browser... compact, fast, and secure.
It's the "winamp" lesson.
My blog
These figures are hellishly exaggerated. I've downloaded Firefox 12 times already. Through in the Opera-cache claim and you end up with Firefox Usage = Bullshit.
I'll subscribe to Slashdot when I see a month without a dupe, a typo, or an article the "editors" didn't read.
but also seem to use it more often. Downloading installing and then decide to not use it (IE is simpler/used to/plays my favourite spyware better) happens a lot too. However in januari about 10% of the pages was views with firefox on my webserver (mix of restaurants, IT, realestate, blogs ea companies use it), The last two months that has risen to about 15%. See http://totalweb.edusupport.nl/usage_200507.html for the stats (near bottom for browser stats).
My wife's sketchblog Blob[p]: Gastrono-me
As stated by other posters it really doesn't matter how many times it is downloaded - it has no bearing at all on usage - what will happen is that downloads will exceed human population. A more accurate gauge may be hits when FireFox checks for updates - but even that may be blocked by firewalls etc. Market Research is the way forward.
Firefox has been downloaded 75 million times. Many of these were upgrades from previous versions, which had already been counted.
Over 500 million songs have been purchased and downloaded from the iTunes Music Store. Many of these were purchased by the same person who had previously downloaded other iTMS songs (and often, the songs were part of an album and not purchased separately).
These really have nothing to do with each other, but it's sort of startling to consider the popularity of Firefox, which many of us depend on all the time and is free, compared to the popularity of something like the iTunes Music Store, which many of us never intend to give a dime to (draconian DRM and all that).
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
I'm trying to look at your screenshot, but IE6 doesn't even say there's a picture there, what the fuck is png, everyone knows pictures are .jpg!
This was attempting to stop this guy from spamming and sending his spyware here (does it every day). Somebody is now killing others for no reasons.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Firefox is built on xul, so any os that runs firefox can run your xul app.
l
http://www.mozilla.org/projects/xul/
http://www.xulplanet.com/
Also as to components you can use in your apps. There is the render engine:
http://www.mozilla.org/newlayout/
http://www.mozilla.org/projects/embedding/GRE.htm
Or the script engine, rhino
http://www.mozilla.org/rhino/
How do they count these downloads? Couldn't many of them be people who are already Firefox users downloading updated versions? New versions seem to come out about every month and a half or so.
These other inferences are contentious:
1: Firefox has been installed on 75 million computers.
2: Firefox is in [regular] use on 75 million computers.
3: Those who have decided to install Firefox are using it on a daily basis.
4: And so many more.
Could it possibly be because Firefox gets a new subversion release every other day, and the only real way to upgrade is to download it again?
Well, whatever, at the rate those versions are going up soon it'll be at 1.7.8 and they can put back all the features they ripped out to make that bastardised POS to begin with.
Ubuntu: If at first you don't succeed, blindly slap a sudo in front of it
CarbonBasedSoda (902364) and gestures (903110) are two sock puppet accounts that have been trolling for hits to a (seriously) shitty blog.
Welcome our new Open-Source, Not-for-Profit Overlords....
Congradulations, Firefox Team.
Don't you mean.. BIZZARO!
The Spread firefox community has helped to develop firefox download counters which can track the exact number of downloads in real time.
I use Firefox! Why? - is the question we should answer.
If a browser is going to embrace the market (open source or not) it needs to add value to the users of the browser. If it's named IE, Firefox or something else is a secondary effect. (I know a lot of us here on SlashDot might use it just because it's cool).
Firefox has in my opinion 3 major advances: Tabbed browsing (when you tried it, you will never live without it again), better security and customization/extras abilities. You may have additional advances, but these are the ones I favor.
When I say better security, its not only a question about how many security holes there are in the browser, its also a question in regards to how many browsers are out there. To target IE is much smarter than some "minor" browser. Of cause this benefit will slowly decrease as Firefox becomes more popular.
Customization is an other issue. You may adjust IE, but the extras for Firefox are really good. I'm not even sure they can be made to IE (at least they are not easy to make). My Firefox is loaded with extensions. And the ones I use are of my own choice (you'll probably have your own favorite list). This option is not available in IE in the same degree. Some likes themes as well. I use the browser daily, so for me it's important to have a very functionally theme rather than a fancy one. (I use a very tiny one to get better space).
When I first installed Firefox I went to my own website (www.rednebula.com), and was disappointed as the layout collapsed... but as I checked the html, I realized that it often was due to errors in my html code that IE simply ignored. Now my website has been tuned to both Firefox and IE, giving better and nicer html... a nice secondary effect.
-:) Oh no - not again.
www.rednebula.com
All the people who I've showed FF are superhappy as they feel their PCs perform better now they understand IE brings in most of their nastyware and they tell about it to their friends, or customers. (A friend at the Blackberry / 3G helpdesk of VodaPhone redirects now everyone having some sortof browsing probs to FF's website to get a copy as she herself feels FF has solved alot of her frustrations.)
I find it a fascinating statement, as were people ACTIVELY go out to find a browser even when there's one preinstalled.
It's a very strong statement...
I think we can keep recursing like this until someone returns 1
from the webpage:
"A Simple Solution. PwdHash is an browser extension that transparently converts a user's password into a domain-specific password. The user can activate this hashing by choosing passwords that start with a special prefix (@@) or by pressing a special password key (F2). PwdHash automatically replaces the contents of these password fields with a one-way hash of the pair (password, domain-name). As a result, the site only sees a domain-specific hash of the password, as opposed to the password itself. A break-in at a low security site exposes password hashes rather than an actual password. We emphasize that the hash function we use is public and can be computed on any machine which enables users to login to their web accounts from any machine in the world. Hashing is done using a Pseudo Random Function (PRF)."
It also works on IE, and the same site has SpoofGuard for IE. SpoofGuard is an antiphising extention. I don't use IE but spreading the word on the above makes the web a safer place.
The 500th million iTunes downloader got 10 iPods, but what did the 75th million firefox downloader got? 10 free Firefox downloads?
Latest data on Firefox market share and versions from a popular (100,000+ unique visitors/day) general-interest site I own, collected in the last 2 days:
Share of pageviews (including robots): 12.3%
Share of pageviews (excluding robots): 13.0%
Most popular versions:
1.7.8 on XP: 23%
1.7.10 on XP: 20%
1.7.5 on XP: 12%
1.7.2 on XP: 5%
1.7.8 on NT: 5%
1.7.x on OS X: 4%
1.7.7 on XP: 4%
1.7.9 on XP: 3%
1.4 on XP: 2%
1.7.3 on XP: 2%
1.7.10 on NT: 2%
1.7.5 on NT: 1%
1.7 on XP: 1%
1.7.8 on Win 98: 1%
1.7.6 on NT: 1%
1.7.10 on Win 98: 1%
1.7.10 on Linux: 1%
Firefox users running the latest version: ~25%
great job firefox team ... thanks to you 2005 is not like 1984 ...
where did my sig go? where's my sig at?
indeed it is now 75000001
Truely cripped...
Huge amounts of work had to be discarded (can not have virus/spyware getting into this software), which probably cost this company no less than 100K
The software was discarded? Were there no backups? I assume that the software was developed in-house, so don't you have the source code? Or did the viruses infect the source-code too? That would be some neat trick! Don't blame Microsoft for your company's incompetence.
I'll probably be modded down for this...
if they were to charge just a dollar - or even 50c for a download.
At my last contract we were not permitted FF, and had to use IE on the grounds that the IS team had not done a security review of FF, but they had of IE. The policy was simply 'better the devil you know'.
I could see their point, up till I asked when they were going to do a review of FF - and they said they weren't.
I think some people just like banging their head on the wall at work, for the feeling of pleasure they get when they stop and go home.
Justin.
You're only jealous cos the little penguins are talking to me.
The Firefox team should just use the Windows Genuine Advantage© Program to validate users, allowing one download per licensed machine. That way, only Javascript hackers will be able to fudge the download numbers. Simple. I should be a marketing exec.
-William Brendel
Actually, the fact that Mozilla has become so popular doesn't surprise me. In Germany over 20% (!) of Internet-users browse through the Net with the Mozilla Browser, each and every one of my co-workers (web-development) uses Mozilla, Greasemonkey scripts and all the other stuff which makes the life of web-users easier contribute to such an enormous development of Mozilla. I wonder, how much time will pass by until IE will lose its dominant position on the "browser-market".
Vitaly Friedman, Saarbruecken, Germany
vitaly.friedman -> creative.web.design.saarbruecken.germany
"... large organizations that want to do deployments."
This really gets to me. Didn't we just recently have a report regarding Weasel Words?
Really, what is actually involved in the "deployment" of a web browser?
Come on. Drop the self-importance and glorification of "software installation" that gives so many techies such a bad reputation as pompous tossers. Maybe some techs deserve that reputation. Since Americans can't appreciate the subtlety of intellegent humour, I guess I'm banking on some Brits to support my comparison here: the IT guy in that fantastic TV programme The Office.
but because this forces authors to create more standard compliant sites which work on multiple platforms.
You're right, however after building a site based completely on Firefox (which looks and works great), it's pretty ugly in IE, and I start to question my initial decision, because there are afterall still 80% of the IE users out there not being served properly.
Having said that, I'm sticking to FF for now, people still using IE probably won't be visiting my site anyway.
FYI 12% of the visitors are using IE and 86% on Firefox, so I guess I'm on the right track!
Rock that crushes, Paper & Scissors that don't matter.
And not only that. The thing that drives me crazy is some sites that almost require pop-ups to work. It is so easy to disable pop-ups in FF that it appears to break those sites (although it really doesn't).
Improve at backgammon rapidly through addictive quickfire position quizzes: www.bgtrain.com
Surely one meaningful number would be the number of downloads via MSIE. This would be the minumum number one could safely assume that are converting.
Another would be the number of downloads from FF on Windows. That would be the approximate lower limit number of people continuing to use Firefox.
rewriting history since 2109
I've seen very few posts pointing out that you can get Firefox from numerous different CD and DVD collections and you can download it from numerous dirrenet download sites. Not everyone is using the Mozilla site, so that will decrease the download amount.
What is important with the download amount is this:
Make a software and try to get 1 million downloads. You can download it yourself as many times as you like. It isn't as easy as it sounds like. Now do the same with 75 million downloads within a year and you might start to understand that even the number of downloads is not the number of actual users, it indicates that there are quite many users using and downloading it. And if they download the updated version that indicates that they are still using it.
Are you sure IE is rendering in standards-compliant* mode? I discovered that it's really easy to knock IE back into quirks mode with things as simple as a XML declaration. After I tracked down what IE was choking on, I was able to create a valid XHTML Strict document that IE likes, too.
*IE's standards-compliant mode isn't, but at least it doesn't have the box model bug.
The other day Firefox informed me that there was an update available. When I clicked on the little red ball with the arrow in the upper right corner, a box pops up showing a Critical Update is available - Firefox 1.0.6. (checked) I click "Install now", I get the Firefox Update dialog saying "Now downloading and installing updates...". However, it never fetches anything. It will happily sit there spinning it's wheels for hours. I have tried 3 times now over the last couple of days - and yes I have checked - it's not being blocked by ZoneAlarm. Perhaps the server is busy uploading some of those 75 million copies?
Futhermore - I can't tell you how many times I have lost my user prefs upgrading Firefox. Now I know enough to go to C:\Documents and Settings\[User]\Aplication data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles and back up my profiles before doing an update. It took a long time to figure that out, and whenever a new update rolls out I forget where to find this folder again and have to look for it. It shouldn't be like this!
Other than the above, I love Firefox, and use it constantly.
It also displays the actual URL of a link, which means that javascript spoofing can't be done so easily.
Security is about all these little things. And Firefox seems much more capable of evolving (particularly as it's open source, meaning anyone can offer up a fix).
It's not clear whether this figure includes update downloads as well.
Congratulations to the Firefox team. You guys are doing a great job.
Does anyone have the Torrent file for Firefox 1.7.10?? I could not download it from the Fx hompage... I guess it is not yet released to the public...
Ubuntu is an African word meaning 'I can't configure Debian'
Is it me or is IE 7 upside down mirrored? What a horrid interface.
I get the feeling that the placing of the tabs is more about not following suit with Opera/Firefox and all the addons for IE wich implements tabs. IE7 will be an empty marketing ploy as usual. They should toss that ugly baby out the bathwater and follow apples lead as the usually do.
HTTP/1.1 400
Firefox has been downloaded 75 million times.
Even that is not accurate:
Firefox has been downloaded 75 million times via the web interface . See my earlier post to see why I believe he majority of Linux users are not included in this count, due to not downloading it via the website.
The only thing we can be sure of is that Firefox is popular. As pointed out elsewhere, exact figures are impossible to obtain. The statistic is still interesting and useful though.
I'll probably be modded down for this...
#!/bin/sh
. 6&os=osx&lang=en-US' > /dev/null;
while true; do
curl -L 'http://download.mozilla.org/?product=firefox-1.0
done
Sadly, when the cotton gin was invented and widely distributed, many lost their job.
Cleanning up malware can make an IS/IT department look busy and valuable.
Make your infrastructure robust and reliable and where would you put the redundant IS/IT people?
I came across a very strange problem with Firefox for Windows the other day. A friend of mine brought me her laptop, saying it was broken. Everything seemed to work, except that Firefox had stopped opening. When she double clicked her desktop shortcut, selected it from the Start menu, or tried to open it directly, it simply wouldn't start up. The process list shows firefox.exe running and taking up about 10MB of RAM, but the window doesn't open.
Reinstalling Firefox and even trying to downgrade and upgrade doesn't fix it. Does anybody know what this problem might be?
Lack of eloquence does not denote lack of intelligence, though they often coincide.
I run a sex toy book site and I'm pleased to see FF being well-used. The known browsers break up as follows:
68.2% MSIE
19.7% Firefox
_3.8% Safari
_3.7% Mozilla
_2.8% Netscape
_1.4% Opera
_0.4% Konqueror
Add up Firefox, Mozilla and Netscape? 26.2% of semi-technical people. The favored versions, each by a huge margin, are MSIE 6.0, Firefox 1.0.4 and Netscape 7.2.
Kinky nerds like FF, too!
I won't argue your point, but why isn't it *packaged* as valuable, reusable modules?
I'm one of those folks still using the "classic" Mozilla, because my family and I spend a fair amount of time in each of the browser and mail clients.
First off, under Linux there's some non-trivial configuration to be done getting them to work together properly. (ie: send link)
Second, those valuable, reusable modules are not separately packages, and then used by Firefox and Thunderbird. Instead, installing Firefox and Thunderbird ends up installing 2 copies of those basics on disk, and dragging 2 copies into RAM. If you're going to be using both during a session, the classic client is leaner.
Plus, repackaging would go partway toward solving the security update problem. I also recognize that a heavily compartmented packaging of Firefox/Thunderbird would probably confuse the heck out of Windows users and annoy the heck out of rpm (not urpmi or yum) users. But for those of us on Gentoo (or urpmi or yum or apt) it would be great. Imagine a Mozilla-* update that no longer requires an overnight build on my aging k6-3.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
or 498,214.29 AOL CDs...
or 234,060,403 old-school AOL floppy disks...
is slashdot going to report on every little milestone that firefox makes in the amount that it's downloaded??
it's almost as bad as apple sites reporting how many songs have been sold on itunes. it's like "ha ha! an open source browser is doing well, let's have all the geeks jumping up and down wetting themselves"
Firefox is good, but it's far from perfect. Both Firefox and Thunderbird eat RAM like cheese (turn on the VM column in the Task Manager and take a look at how much RAM it's using. At one stage this morning, I had 8 tabs open and firefox was using over 200mb of memory (on a 512mb machine). I exited and reloaded the same tab group (using an extension) and that seemed to free up most of the ram so it was only using 50mb. I hate to say this but this RAM mismanagement (I won't call it a leak as it is fixed by a restart) doesn't seem to occur with IE 7.
I think the Firefox and Thunderbird developers need to take a serious look at memory management in both these products. Thunderbird is currently using 110mb of RAM on my machine. It seems totally unsuited to people who like to keep a lot of their email on IMAP servers (a few thousand messages - which I have to, for work).
It also has several annoying bugs which are marked as "WONT FIX" in bugzilla - despite the fact that hundreds of users find these bugs an irriation.
I also seem to end up with Firefox opening two windows when I load it. The second window has most of the toolbars missing and is usually displaying the blue update icon. No idea what's causing this...
Raise your hand if your tired of both the Firefox and iTunes "X Million Downloads" stories. Pretty soon other sites will be running "x Million Stories" updates tracking the number of "X Million Downloads" stories that appear on Slashdot.
i see a lto of talk about security, people bashing withut thought or affirming without thought. simple fact of security for me, and for most i know, is the response to a threat. MS dilly dallys and covers up before thy finally "fix" i say "fix" becasue MS never fixes, they just change the access route. Mozilla WILINGLY announced their big issue before anyone else. they also asked peole for patience while they work on a fix. within 24 yhours they had a genuine fix. this is the history of netscape/mozilla. this is why they are gaining in popularity. obviously as they get larger they will have more targets, but they have a track record fo announcing early and asking for patience while they fix it with suggestion on how to avoid it. MS takes the opposite approach: cover up and ignore until pressure is too great MS == lazy dinosaur
What do you mean there's no +1 phb?
this isn on FF/XP SP2 @ work @ home i have two POSIX (FC3 w/SE on serving to family and friends and another FreeBSD) systems that i use
I for one, LOVE Mozilla and Firefox! If they had a fan club, I'd be in it. And BTW, Widoze DOES SUX !
I use firefox at home and think its great however at college its installed however by default it cannot access the net unless you discover the proxy settings which is amazingly easy. On the other hand IE can be locked down quite a lot recently the college disabled right click which I consider I personally hate (also its not a complete lock down as you would expect there are ways to get around it). But getting to my point does anyone know how you can lock Firefox down, the only way my college will have Firefox as default is if they can lock down features such as the file protocol, viewing of Options/Preferences etc, I dont mind them locking features down as long as they will use Firefox Im yet to find anything online.
In related news: IE reaches 75 million security patches.
You seem like the typical person here who assumes Firefox = No security issues past, present and future. IE = Continual threat past, present and future. Yes, IE had/has security holes, but just because Firefox is not IE doesn't mean it will never have security issues either, heck it's already had a whole bunch. The browser really isn't your problem with security. IE can be configured in a way that it is just as safe as a stock Firefox browser. Your company needs to invest in better training for it's employees, virus/spyware detectors, firewalls and IDS's. Your getting mad at a sysadmin/security person for not wanting to blindly trust a browser that is in a 1.x revision. Yes, any new product will have less holes then an existing one. But blindly putting a new piece of software out mearly because of hype is no better then forcing people to run IE.
and also...
"Huge amounts of work had to be discarded"
Because of spyware? This is one of those copy-paste trolls right? Seriously I ran IE for a long ass time and never got any spyware. Your developers are clicking Yes when a random website wants to run an ActiveX script? Any spyware i've ever had came from Kazaa or P2P networks. If the people developing your software are getting their computers infected to the point of throwing away hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of work, perhaps you should consider outsourcing.
We live in a world where people judge everything by the way it looks.
And there's nothing wrong with that in my opinion. Men judge women (and I guess vice-versa) on their "look and feel" too after all ... Marketeers in the software business should focus on that aspect as well.
I have run my Python curl script running with 5 threads! I download Firefox 25 times per hour and so do 20 of my friends!
I must have personally downloaded Firefox, be it for upgrades or reinstalls, no less than... 30 times.
How about marketshare numbers?
Stumble-Upon is worth switching to firefox alone
That's over 75 * 106 * ~5 Mb transferred (considering only Firefox on Windows.)
Roughly 4 * 108 Mb = 4 * 105 Gb = 400 Tb data from all it's mirrors over what, 6 months?
Wow.
I find its less a layout problem and more a style problem. I make sites that look nice in FF, using, for example, dotted borders. Loading the same page in IE, however, renders a dashed border as IE doesn't seem to differentiate. It makes a huge difference and my page now looks horrible.
Firefox is a great positive step for the web, but correcting dominant non-progressive problematic browsers would be great, not just for the web as a place to be, but for the web as a place to design for.
not that it never has problems. The firefox community should NEVER sell firefox as permanently problem-free, but instead a much more solid foundation that has FAR FEWER PROBLEMS and those GET FIXED QUICKLY as opposed to Microsoft which fixes things patchwork instead of addressing the problem as a whole like firefox did!
75 million "downloads" does not mean there are 75 million users out there. Since 64 million on July 22, they claim another 11 million users? Bullshit. There have been 3 updates in the past 2 weeks, forcing me to download the ENTIRE Firefox package again each time. What this means is, only 3.5 million people downloaded a package of Firefox and of those 3.5 million users, probably about 500,000 were NEW users. I wish they'd stop inflating their numbers and put out a "service pack" instead of WASTING MY TIME AND BANDWIDTH!
-- Game Developers: Stop porting badly-textured games from crappy console systems!
I do wonder how, of all people, microsoft gets away with it. You can't attach files, for example, in hotmail with non-IE (firefox or konqueror at least). And msn purposefully given bad html specifically to firefox. How on earth do they get away with it?
Opera has the best track record on safety - at the moment, no other Windows-based browsers can claim the same level of security as Opera - none. This is because in Opera 8, all flaws have been fixed - there are no known security flaws, no problems that have been fixed through workarounds. I personally prefer Firefox for the expansibility, but since safety seems to be a concern, Opera is better.
Most people's beef with Opera is that it is a commercial product - the programmers work hard and want money, that's odd.
That's probably also the reason my GP post was moderated Flamebait. "You say a for-money browser is better than a for-free browser? YOU BASTARD!"
As I mentioned, I prefer Firefox. I'm just pointing out that Opera is safer, how is that flamebait unless you're a F/OSS-fanboy?
...and I still don't own one (and I never will). Unless MJ starts biting heads of bats and howling at the moon...err wait, we already have Ozzie. Nevermind...big numbers still don't mean much.
Wouldn't they benefit from releasing the beta, then waiting for the slashdot story? This would provide free beta testing for the UI. MS would even get feedback on which ideas are good and which ideas are way out of line.
Just a thought
75 million downloads
- 20 million downloads to 2nd or 3rd computer
=====
55 million downloads
/ 5 (number of updates which virtually require waiting a few weeks to a month before you can use the update button, or just go ahead and download a whole new copy immediately with security fixes)
=====
11 million unique users.
Hey! I downloaded Firefox last night to install on my brand new Powerbook! Was I the 75th million downloader?
Yeah, right.
... get a counter in the front page with the exact number of firefox downloads, updated every minute, and a permament discussion thread about it, instead of getting a: "FireFox reached XXmillion downloads" article each week?
Just my two cents.
*** Suerte a todos y Feliz dia!
Why would you use hotmail or msn?
that they release patches as new versions. I've downloaded Firefox over a dozen times myself for use on 3 computers, just to keep current on bug fixes. If they released separate patches, I'd probably only count as 1 or 2 downloads.
Many people make the mistake of thinking that "look and feel" of any product is just some shallow cosmetic thing that only ADD afflicted 14 year olds care about.
:D
The thing is, on average, something like the issue of a 15 hour battery and a 24 hour battery only affect the user once or twice in a long period of time, but a horrible interface affects end users every single time they use the product.
I've seen people complain about how their "computer is broken and sucks", only to find out their trackball mouse is full of lint and needs to be cleaned.
75 million downloads, figure initial download was 1/2 the size of the last download, spread over versions 1.00, 1.01, 1.02, 1.03, 1.04, 1.05, 1.06 - now figure half the people never or rarely upgrade - which i can verify, have found many people who don't know what the arrow in the upper right of the browser means - and we have ....
...
10-20 million Firefox users.
Good number, really. Now, if we were MSFT, we'd hype this and say that this year over 100 million people used Firefox
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Firefox is just an application of several interesting technologies the Mozilla Foundation has been proudly implementing for a very long time by now, namely: the Gecko renderer, the XUL presentation system to build GUIs, the XPCOM cross-platform component model and others.
If you want to build applications, use those same as Firefox. It's the same with IE: you don't drop IE as a web viewer control or something into your application, you use the same components from which IE is built.
So, yes, the Mozilla technology is amazing, valuable, reusable and there's plenty of it to build tons of nice apps...
I don't feel like it...
Portable Firefox, baby.
I guess that was three words. Anyway, drop it onto your hard drive, and you'll never have to care what your IT nazis think about Firefox. It runs without installing.
Subversively yours,
Sean
"Firefox Downloads Reach 75 Million" " recent security vulnerabilities have slightly lowered the browser's growth rate" ???
Chris ,
Php Programmers.
Now if they can get the XSL transformation object to work in javascript, my life will be complete. I really have to applaud Firefox for stepping up their game on Ajax though. It's really beginning to compete with IE in the XML/JS implementation.
I'm glad to be one of those 5,925,000,000 people that doesn't use FireFox.
After a very bad experience with FireFox I want to say: Never again Mozilla, never again will use your crap.
More interesting statistics would be to see what percentage of internet users are really using Firefox !!
This is ment to inform the mass market that Firefox doesn't run well in a Windows environment. In fact on my XP machine it crashes 20 times more often then IE.
I remember using Mozilla on Linux in the past and had crashing issues with that too.
So you know what. I'm perfectly happy using a web browser that works... like IE. So shove it, Open Source!
It just reached 76 million. Quick post a new story about it.
Let me anticipate the usual flames: everybody who accesses your Babylon 5 fan site uses Firefox. Firefox is a much better browser. Anybody who cares about security should switch. We'll never have standards compliance as long as Microsoft is in the driver's seat.
All true. But face it, the big switch isn't happening. Time to figure out why and do something about it, and stop living in denial.
Personally I think we should all... http://www.getie7.com/ :-P
When you pull numbers out of your ass, you look stupid.
I have a hard time caring about a "story" posted by someone with the name WindozeSux. But I care enough to rant. McDonald's has served billions. Where's that story on Slashdot?
Microsoft is a singular word (not plural), so the appropriate usage is "Has Microsoft dropped it's...". ("Have" would have fit if the sentence instead read "Have Microsoft and Apple dropped it's..."). Also, the possessive word "its" never has an apostrophe.
Other than that, you make a lot of good points about meaningless UI scrambling that has no purpose other than to infuriate users. Microsoft has done this in a bad way with other Windows versions. This includes such features as search (which they wrecked by the time of XP) and making it harder to fix the date and time settings. And, since "start, run" is a common click sequence, they decided to wreck that by moving the run button a ways away as well.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.