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."

Comments

Re:Diversity and competition is the Important Thin

[SimilarityEngine]

I sincerely hope so, because I'm well and truly sick of this sort of situation.

The competition isn't coming.

[Ckwop]

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:

1. Where the fuck is the refresh button? After ten minutes you work out it's the little button next to the right of the URL entry bit.
2. Why is the menu Below the tabs. I find this inconsistent and confusing. Worst of all, there's no way to put it in it's proper position.
3. Have Microsoft dropped it's entire design team, the tabs look simply awful. That little grey bit to the right of the tabs allows you to create a new tab by clicking on it. That's fairly cool, but holy shit it just looks wrong.
4. The home icon on the left hand side of the screen is in that default position, unexpanded, where did my Favourites go or everything else go?
5. If this is it, what took so freaking long?

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.

Re:The competition isn't coming.

[Antony.S]

"FYI, the menu bar is below the tab bar so it can stay contextual to the document being viewed in that tab, be it a PDF, a Word document or an Excel sheet. It's a simple switch that affords a great increase in versatility with no practical downsides, and you're knocking it simply because firefox does it differently and you don't like the look of it? Bitch please."

What the fuck? Firefox does it differently? The entire Microsoft product line since Windows 95 does it different.

Re:Can Firefox be marketed?

[BlueLightning]

Well, there is the Mozilla ActiveX project. You can embed the Mozilla ActiveX control into any application to add built-in browsing functionality, just like you can with the IE one (shdocvw).

XUL

[Trevelyan]

Firefox is built on xul, so any os that runs firefox can run your xul app.
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.html
Or the script engine, rhino
http://www.mozilla.org/rhino/

Firefox market share and versions

[webplay]

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%

Re:Firefox market share and versions

[baadger]

For those confused by parents version numbers, Firefox actually contains the Mozilla version number (and rightly so).

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7.9) Gecko/20050711 Firefox/1.0.5

Measuring statistics on the Gecko/Mozilla engine just makes more sense than tagetting Firefox version numbers.

Re:relevance

[A beautiful mind]

It's important to note, that the counter DOES NOT count if it detects a download from a firefox browser (user_agent), so generally the firefox update stuff doesn't count...

Re:Perspective

[ziggamon2.0]

Well, actually, no... First of all, as has been said approximately 75 million times, no, the upgrades are NOT included. Not included. No. 75 million is a good approximation on the number of users Firefox has, although it has both false positives (redownloading) and false negatives (one download, many installs, linux users, etc). 75 million is the only number we have and it's about right.

500 million songs is downloaded songs. Not downloads of iTunes. It's very probable that the average user has downloaded more than 6,67 (500/75) songs each, which would make Firefox more popular than iTunes.

Now consider that Firefox still has some kind of "scary open source thing only for nerds, why would I need it when IE works prefectly fine" ring to it's name, and iTunes is just "Look ma, I'm downloading songs legally", I'd say that the Firefox 75 million number is pretty darn impressive!

Re:I use Firefox! Why?

[zerocool^]

You need to dumb it down.

When I tell people they need to use firefox, and they ask why?, this is my answer:

If you use firefox, you'll get less spyware. Spyware comes from 2 sources: downloading it on purpose, and through bugs in internet explorer. Since IE is tied in so closely with windows, any time there's a bug, it usually leaks over into windows, and that's how they get spyware on your system. If you use firefox, it's just a program. I think it has less bugs in it, but even if it does have bugs, they're less likely to get into windows.
So, 1.) Don't download weather bug or screen savers, etc, because a lot of times, spyware piggybacks on them, and 2.) Use firefox.

It's technical enough to get across the point that there's a lot of shit going on in the background that they don't need to know about, but it's simple enough that any moron can understand it, and still feel like they know something special, something l33t about computers.

~Will