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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."
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.
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...
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
So your saying that IE7 is rubbish because it doesn't look nice? It's still in beta FFS! I know a lot of people on Slashdot hate Microsoft but this is getting ridiculous.
Anybody can write a program, writing a program that is easy for a non-literate person to use is a real challenge.
We live in a world where people judge everything by the way it looks. People buy Ipods because they look and feel better than the competition even though there are high capacity, longer battery life alternatives.
Even if we discount the visual side of IE, it's still rubish. It's so far away from standard compliance that it might aswell be considered it's own platform. It delivered full PNG support half a decade too late. ActiveX needs no introduction. It's crap, and this version is no better.
Simon.
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 suppose the most significant statistic for web developers would be: what proportion of browser requests to my site originate from browsers others than IE?
It is the growth of this number that will motivate the development of more standards-compliant web pages.
Problem is, browsers can "lie" about their identity (usually to pretend to be IE) - a practice that itself will only decline when IE is no longer the assumed "standard".
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
Let me guess: you don't write software?
Minor interface issues like where to place buttons by default (which can probably be customized anyway) is the least of your problems when developing a browser. The big issues are things that you can't see without examining the code, like how the rendering engine decides which layout algorithm to use depending on the CSS display and float properties. Etc. etc. etc.
In short: You're reacting like you are saying a house is crap because it's ugly, at the stage the walls haven't even been painted yet.
.: Max Romantschuk
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
You should design the user interface THEN code the rest of the functionality around that.
No. You should determine the use cases for your application and THEN design the both UI and the funtionality around those.
.: Max Romantschuk
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.