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

Diversity and competition is the Important Thing

[Max Romantschuk]

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.

relevance

[R.D.Olivaw]

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.

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:relevance

[Glenn R-P]

In the previous months, I've downloaded FireFox 1.01, 1.02, 1.03, 1.04, 1.05, 1.06! As FireFox does not download a patch for a security update and one has to download the whole thing again (quite silly in my opinion), does these 6 downloads count as 1 or as 6 in Mozilla's book?
It would be interesting to see a graph of downloads versus date. If you count as six downloads, then the graph would likely show bumps for a few days following each release. If you count as only one, then the graph would be smoother. In fact I count as zero, because I use third-party (amano) downloads that support MNG.

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.

[Ckwop]

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.

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.

It's a big number.

[MarkByers]

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.

Re:It's a big number.

[Anonymous Coward]

The number is big, and still increasing.

Well, I for one would be really surprised if it started declining.

Promoters

[KiloByte]

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.

Some advice to the Firefox team

[pieterh]

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.

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).

Stupid Firefox fanboy!

[Winckle]

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!

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%

Same here/

[aug24]

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.

Here's how to make it accurate...

[wbren]

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.