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Firefox Hits 80,000,000 Downloads
asa writes "It's been nine months since the release of Firefox 1.0 and with tens of millions of users we most certainly are taking back the web. Today our Firefox web browser hit the 80,000,000 downloads mark. You can see the live counter over at SpreadFirefox.com."
...how many of those downloads are unique users, vs. prior users downloading a new version?
not 80,000,000 users. I've probably downloaded the various versions of Opera at least 20 times, between new versions and new installs of Windows. The actual number of users is far lower.
Even those who arrange and design shrubberies are under considerable economic stress at this period in history.
My weblogs show that IE is still the dominant browser, even though my two sites are primarily trafficked by those who are tech-savvy (who you think would be using a browser other than IE).
How about posting some numbers? I run a few medium University sites (1k-5k daily visitors) with a decidedly non-techy focus and the last couple months have seen IE fall under 80% (not counting hits by the web developers and other department staff).
Obviously IE is still dominant in absolute terms, but there's a huge difference between 95% (where we were 4 years ago) and 80%.
Firefox Usage is about 5% and growing.
Not much not much.
But, at a store, you do not randomly kick out 1 out of every 20 people who walk in.
5% means nothing, 1 out of 20 means much more. And growing just means it's something to pay even more attention to.
...still using straight Mozilla? Maybe I just haven't played with Firefox enough to get it set up the way I want but I find the Mozilla interface much more comfortable.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
Mod me flamebait, but do you have to make a headline on the front page whenever they hit a small milestone? Perhaps only posting when they've hit things like 50,000,000, 75,000,000, 100,000,000 etc., would allow for more timely news?
We all know that the counter is steadily increasing and that the user base is growing rapidly -- but must this much news space be devoted to one subject?
Don't get too excited! According to Broadband Reports and ComputerWorld: "The streak of Mozilla's Firefox browser gaining market share from Microsoft's Internet Explorer has come to a grinding halt in July. For the first time since Firefox Version 1.0 made its debut, Internet Explorer was able to regain some lost ground. Firefox's market share shrunk to 8.07% in July from 8.71% in June, while Internet Explorer grew its share to 87.2% in July from 86.56% the previous month."
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
Before my site went down last week for no obvious reason (and is still down), my highest traffic was from:
MSNbot
Googlebot
Yahoobot
Opera
Something Mozilla based
IE didn't even register.
"Champagne for my real friends - and real pain for my sham friends!" http://ericblade.postalboard.com/
Lots of downloads are nice and all, but there's some serious bug issues to fix, like memory leaks.
It seems every day now that FF will randomly max out the CPU for around half a minute at a time. It does this around 5 times a day it seems. I have Win2K with FF version 1.06, but it's been doing that the last few upgrades.
People that complain about the ads at the top of the trial versions of Opera are complete faggots. If a company wants to give you a free trial of something they are going to at least either disable something / add something annoying / or limit number of uses.
Why is it when Google used context sensitive ads in Gmail people did not complain half as much as they do about Opera's free trials. Opera is loads better / faster / more stable. Most of the Firefox "innovations" came from Opera.
People say that Opera only sucks because it costs money, how many people in the open source community / Slashdot actually paid for their version of Windows? Probably less than 4%. I bought Opera a long time ago and have stuck with it ever since. If you want Opera so bad just google for a serial.
Opera > Firefox in every way possible.
Someone should start http://www.spreadopera.com/
Opera's yearly earnings are a testament to how badass the browser is. People are willing to pay for something in that niche ( the browser market ) that they could easily get for free ( Firefox / IE ) Thats a testament to how great Opera is.
I've downloaded a single time and installed on multiple computers, some via network and others not on the network by using a "Utility" disk that I carry with me to install certain applications without having to go online unprotected when I'm cleaning up a compromised system or getting a new one ready to use. Some of the other applications on that CD are, Ad-Aware, Spybot, AVG antivirus, Zone Alarm firewall.
"Do the Right Thing. It will gratify some people and astound the rest." - Mark Twain
In the past 12 months I have downloaded FireFox at least 30 times.
In addition to that, I have *updated* it (on several systems that I own (and re-install) about 10-15 times.
Perhaps I'm more active than Average Joe, but you get the picture...
In this world nothing is certain but death, taxes and flawed car analogies.
one thing that's always bugged me is that i used the full mozilla suite prior to using firefox and briefly trying out thunderbird.
;}
firefox and thunderbird offer to import IE and/or outlook / outlook express settings & email but don't even offer the option of importing mozilla suite info.
i've since heard that you can just 'point' firefox at mozilla's settings and it will pick up the bookmarks, but how is the average user supposed realize this kind of thing?
particularly with thunderbird / mozilla - if i happened to start using the mozilla suite, and wanted to try thunderbird next, it is by no means intuitive or apparent if i can get my email from one program to another...to this day i'm still using mozilla as my mail and firefox for browsing because i don't want to risk losing my email because i decided to try pointing thunderbird at my mozilla mail and have it screw up or blow away my email...
for the opposite view, i use mozilla for my email and firefox for my browsing - but there is no way to get mozilla mail to open url links in anything but mozilla's browser... open source developer whine about microsoft not playing nice with other programs, but this is the most 'lock in' type behavior i've ever seen...
even in outlook express you can get your links opening in firefox or another browser, but mozilla suite assumes that it is the only browser in the world and doesn't even give you a chance to try and open links in other programs.
that said, i did try thunderbird for a week or so but then it crashed and blew away my email inbox (with all of the emails in it) and i haven't gone back...i don't need my business emails being blown away randomly
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