Slashdot Mirror
Firefox Tops 100 Million Downloads
webslash writes "Mozilla's Firefox web browser crossed the 100 million downloads milestone today. Webmasters are adding Firefox download counters on websites to keep track of the downloads in real time. Firefox celebrated 50 million downloads just 6 months back and with the release of Firefox 1.5 Beta 2. Additionally the Firefox 2/3 roadmap also looks promising."
In comparison, the 2004 Christmas webcam had 67.9% IE, 21.1% Firefox, 2.7% Netscape, 2.7% Safari, 2.4% Mozilla, and 1.6% Opera. Not a lotta change, although one interesting thing is the drop in Mozilla (everyone uses Firefox now?) and Netscape - no surprise on the later.
This would support some of the press that says Firefox growth is slowing. Having said that, Firefox just ROCKS - really sucks when you can do something cool in HTML/CSS (example :hover) and IE doesn't support it.
And obligatory "extensions are cool" too ... GO FIREFOX!
Hulk SMASH Celiac Disease
More sec bugs => more downloads
What does this have to do with Google?
really 867993
Karma schkarma
Yeah,
100 million, billion, jillion, whatever is great. Those numbers can be achieved via the same people downloading multiple releases. But, how many singular installtions are there. Now that would be an interesting statistic.
---- Go ahead, mod me down, I'll just post it again and you lose your mod points.
It's at times like this when I feel so good about being part of the Firefox community. Let's keep working towards a safer internet and safer computers. Go Firefox!
120 char limit? How the hell am I supposed to cram my favorite sig quote and make it fit in here? =p
What are your percentages looking like on *your* web site ? Statcounter is telling me almost 40% are using some flavor of Firefox lately... Safari is on the rise too!
~jennifer.k~
This is not a troll, but ever since Opera went free-as-in-beer, my Firefox icon gets used about as frequently as my IE link does (I have the IE 7 beta as well, but it's just laughable in comparison).
Of course to me the primary benefits of Firefox were standards compliance, features, cross-platform capabilities, and free-as-in-beer. I get all of those advantages, along with improved speed and a few more feaures (e.g. native SVG, something that is coming to a stable Firefox release any-year-now), in Opera. Of course I do miss some of the Firefox plug-ins, which is why I jump over to it on occasion.
Am I alone in feeling this way? I suspect that the freeing of Opera has had more of an impact on Firefox than anything Microsoft is doing.
thats alot of firefox. ive downloaded it at least 30 times though so it not like that is their user base? do we get a new ad blocker as a reward?
My webstats shows firefox as being 34% based on 10,000 unique visitors.
Considering the number of version updates that have been released due to security holes, are they counting *unique* downloads? After all, I have downloaded 1.0.0 through 1.0.7, does that count as seven downloads?
bun-fhuinneog agam!
.... If a certian chair throwing CEO is taking note.
This is my opinion. To make sure you don't steal it, it's covered by the DMCA.
I have downloaded Firefox at least 5 times or so just for myself (upgrades, reinstalls, different computers, etc). I wonder what the statistics are on average number of downloads per person.
Well even if they're ridiculously high, 100 million is a freaking huge number. Even if the average person has downloaded it 10 times, that still means over 10 million people are using it worldwide.
WARNING: If accidentally read, induce vomiting.
So we see what version numbers they plan to use. How about some indication of planned features (svg? css3? smil? Qt? client cert creation? ...)
I have on my hdd:
- Firefox Setup 1.0.2.exe
- Firefox Setup 1.0.3.exe
- Firefox Setup 1.0.4.exe
- Firefox Setup 1.0.6.exe
- Firefox Setup 1.0.6.exe
- Firefox Setup 1.0.6.exe
- FirefoxSetup-0.9.2-pl-PL.exe
- FirefoxSetup-0.9.2-pl-PL.exe
- FirefoxSetup-0.9.2-pl-PL.exe
- FirefoxSetup-1.0PR-pl-PL.exe
And the count me for 10!
Firefox two thirds? Since when did it slip down five sixths of a version?
Guy asked me for a quarter for a cup of coffee. So I bit him.
Yes well you also fail to take into consideration IT departments which download once and install multiple times. IT departments have to maintain control over installed software so they just maintain install images and a localized software depository and push it out when it is needed or update that one copy when needed. So the stat is flawed both ways.
But I would say that I would think it balances out and that this still is probably the best stat we have for judging it's growth. It would be nice to see a graph of downloads month by month to REALLY see the growth in adoption rate.
This is my sig. There are many like it but this one is mine.
That could mean that 1 million people downloaded firefox 100 times... I've personally downloaded firefox at least 100 times.
"Additionally the Firefox 2/3 roadmap also looks promising."
can you explain what looks promising in that link concerning 2/3? "The Ocho"? I guess thats promising...
For instance, when mozilla comes out with an upgraded version and my FF browser's auto-update thing downloads the whole new browser version, does that count as one of these downloads? Cause that just means that every time they come out with a new version the download counter gets the who user base added to it.
100 million is impressive, Im just wondering where the numbers are coming from.
"In the game of life, someone always has to lose. To me, if life were fair, that someone would always be Oklahoma." -DKR
I made this story appear 26 times the fox sat on my mouse.
They fitted George Orwell's coffin with rollers so he could turn over more easily years ago.
It's my birthday today!
In case anyone was wondering where they got the name "The Ocho" for the name of FireFox 2.0, I believe it was from the movie, Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story, where the station that was covering the dodgeball tournament was "ESPN 8" aka "the ocho".
As a web designer, I much prefer the beta release of Firefox over the stable 1.0.7 release. A number of HTML and CSS rendering bugs have been fixed; for example, anything:hover (using a :hover CSS effect with a non-A element) now works with a mouse wheel (this is broken in 1.0.7). 1.0.7 has some buggyness with rendering complex table-based layouts; 1.5beta doesn't. The instability I saw using older releases of Deer Park (Firefox 1.5) has been taken care of.
Additionally, for people who perfer to use Firefox in another language (such as the far more elegant form of English they speak over in England, or the Latin American Spanish that all the beautiful girls in the world speak), Firefox 1.5 Beta (a.k.a. Deer Park) has already been translated in to a number of foregin languages. Deer Park also is current with all known security problems.
The only issue I've seen with Deer Park is that, on Linux, it uses that new method for choosing a directory to open or save a file in (could somebody please name it for me); this may or may not be your cup of tea. I prefer the older file chooser, but can see the advantages of the newer file chooser.
Firefox
61.9 %
MS Internet Explorer
19.9 %
www.whitedust.net
For 2.0 it's gonna be The Next Big Thing. And for 3.0 The Next Next Big Thing.
What a promise!
Articulos para gente geek: Poleras, linux, libros y mas
I know I personally have downloaded it a few times, and only use it on 1 machine. Then I've downloaded the betas, and alphas, and well you get it. I'm sure I'm not the only one.
Not to take away from the moment, but the implication that 100mil people using it is a bit far fetched.
Not to jab at the spirit of TFA, but how many unique downloads does this equate to? What does 100M downloads really mean? I've downloaded Firefox dozens of times since v1.0 because of system rebuilds or other reasons. I have to imagine that other sys admins and power users out there have downloaded it more times than me for the same reason(s).
I'm just glad that with more people using Firefox it means more websites can't ignore gecko browsers, especially since I use the Mozilla Suite. It has has the effect of discontinuing the suite, but at least I can use Seamonkey and get an updated suite, and maybe i'll switch over when they finish the whole XUL Runner, so running multiple applications (Mail, Browser, Chat, etc), wont each create their own XUL baggage.
While this is great news it doesn't really tell us anything about how many people are using firefox. Every good geek out there downloads just about every new release which means that figure is huge compared to the user base. They might as well have just said "We do a lot of releases". It has basically the same meaning.
I used to have a better sig but it broke.
Are here. Not many folks still using IE 6.0! Of course, RubyForge is a pretty niche web site...
I would have posted the stats here, but the lameness filter stymied me. Ah well.
The Army reading list
You dumbass. They don't say jack shit about Firefox 2 or 3. Woowee! The code name is a reference from Dodgeball! Holy shit, I can't wait for that. It sounds really, really promising! OMG!
Slashdot: 24 hours behind every other site or your money back!
I am not a virgin any more!
I hope they have a separate counter for the release version of FF 1.5 because that will be truer account of FF's popularity.
It's one thing to have FF 1.0x but given the auto-update feature in FF 1.5, you'd have to be a fool not to upgrade.
I just hope you don't need to run FF 1.5 as Admin for the Auto-update feature to work.
Obama's legacy: (N)othing (S)ecure (A)nywhere and (T)error (S)imulation (A)dministration
With a 2.4 GHz Athlon 64, 2 GB of DDR400, and two 7200 RPM 8 MB cache drives in RAID 0
You were just waiting for a chance to slip that into the conversation, weren't you?
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
I don't care so much about statistics, but got interested by this quote:
... ?
Additionally the Firefox 2/3 roadmap also looks promising.
Let's look the roadmap...
2.0, "The Ocho", 2006, The Next Big Thing
3.0, ???, Bugs, The Next Next Big Thing
Nice, but what would be the goals for The Next Big Thing? To quote again:
Goals
We are still working on goals for 2.0/3.0 and are drafting a PRD for its development. Some likely goals include:
* Improvements to Bookmarks/History
* Per-Site Options
* Enhancements to the Extensions system, Find Toolbar, Software Update, Search and other areas.
* Accessibility compliance
* More
That doesn't look very promising to me. It would be revolutionary if web browsers in general could break the monopoly of JavaScript and introduce other script languages (python, ruby,...) on the client side. This would boost the web applications much further as they are now. That's just a wish, but probably a security nightmare.
Still my question remains: what's the next big thing for web browsers?
Firefox has been on a precipitous decline at w3schools.com. For each of the last 4 months Firefox has lost user share, while IE has risen. In fact, IE is the only browser with a rising share over the last 4 months.a sp
http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.
May 2005 ===> Sept 2005
IE 5 and 6: 71.6% ===> 75.5%
Firefox: 21.0% ===> 18.0%
Mozilla: 3.1% ===> 2.5%
Netscape 0.7% ===> 0.4%
Opera 7 and 8: 1.3% ===> 1.2%
-- "I never gave these stories much credence." - HAL 9000
A veritable skulk of Firefoxen? *Ducks*
I had heard that three Brazilian copies have been downloaded!
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
should be:
Just looks like Firefox has a 2/3 compromise... reminds me of 3/5 compromise. Is that how browser statistics will be measured?
/joking of course.
I couldn't agree with you more. This is my main problem with Firefox. I think the browser has a lot of potential, but it's extremely slow and bloated. There's no reason why Firefox needs to be eating up 175MB of memory with only 3 tabs open. Not to mention the problems with its slowness after minimization and everything else that you noted. I've also noticed that it's slow to start upon initial start, as well.
The slowness factor and memory issues are the only things keeping me from using Firefox 100%. Things like the Web Developer extension are unmatched anywhere else, and when combined with some other really grat plugins, Firefox has all the right tools... now it just needs to focus on speed and those memory issues that have been around for such an awfully long time now....
A community-oriented lyrics site
Been enjoying the releases, having it as preferred browser since the phoenix days, on different platforms. Windows releases are really great, Linux releases, well its a plugin thing, something which have been improved greatly.
Now on the FreeBSD platform it is pretty stable as well, I just wish FreeBSD/Gnome/Mozilla+ could get together, especially I'ld cheer for much better plugin support/installation/management. But guess, the plugin system is still not that cross platform? having to have everything compiled, for firefox updates and java as well..
Well perhaps next christmas.
But definately, things are moving great. Lets keep it up, have to control the upper ground before Microsoft will attack with alternative lock tactics with Vista, Winforms and what else they got coming to keep the technology coming together for the users across platforms.
Most of my family uses Firefox. The only one left is my mother who complains that some sites don't work. But my father, and two sisters have used Netscape when I first got them on the computer, then Mozilla, and now Firefox. I've even got my father on Thunderbird. And the only one who complains about problems with the computer: my mother. Everyone else, I never hear a peep out of. And of course, I use it.
Kernel Krunch - Part of a Complete OS
The firefox web developer toolbar extension is a necessity for anyone working on websites. SearchStatus, IE View, CustomizeGoogle, and Adblock are also extensions I couldn't live without.
I used to want to tell the world about this great new browser called firefox, but more and more I now want to keep it my little secret. If a program like Adblock were to become part of the standard firefox package (like pop-up blocking currently is) and also turned on by default to block most ads, whats going to happen to websites that depend on ad revenue to exist?
If firefox, or Opera, were to theoretically add ad blocking by default, and in turn advertise their browser as the one that makes all the annoying ads go away, it could really begin to take market share from IE. The bigger fear is that microsoft will then add their own ad blocking feature which would mean that ad blocking would become main stream.
The fact that webmasters seem to be the biggest promoter of this, or any alternative browser, seems ironic. Finding that millions of people now have the opportunity to not view my ads, is not exactly good news.
I told a friend of mine that uses Windows to try Firefox and he later claimed something similar. I would like to say that this is not indicative of my Linux experience with Firefox. It works as expected, with no latency, and is not bogged-down by my running of more applications/tabs/etc.
Click here or here.
"Additionally the Firefox 2/3 roadmap also looks promising."
Really? All I saw listed for 2 and 3 was "The Next Big Thing" and "The Next Next Big Thing". Maybe this is the wrong link?
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
-- Pablo Picasso
Hmm, six tabs open - 42 meg used. Win XP, Athlon 2100, .5 gig ram
And you thought a few security updates for IE was bad - every couple of weeks there's some fatal flaw in FireFox that you have to scramble to fix (and if you aren't watching the news, you may not know you are at risk).
... especially with a two monitor setup.
And tabs are way over-rated
Yeehaw!
Scott McNealy to Michael: "Suck my Sun!" Michael Dell to Scott : "Lick my Dell!"
He's trolled 2 first posts today pimping his own web-site, all so he can scam more money out of Google's adsense.
..it counts as 8 downloads. I'm praying you're not a C programmer.
--- What
Firefox is certainly a great home browser. It's the one I use, and I recommend it to everyone else.
But it is still far too dificult to deploy on a company network. I know, I have done it. I used FFdeploy to make it a bit easier.
Now that FF is on a solid path to conquer the personal desktops it deserves, I would really like to see some progress towards helping administators manage network installs.
How do I upgrade 25 client machines running 1.0.4 to 1.0.7 on a Samba network? Ideally, I would just put all files somewhere, and call xcopy from the logon script. Unfortunately, it is almost certain to break stuff (particularly with extensions).
I guess I can finally stop hitting that download button over and over and over. I wore out 3 mice already!
Google own several major developers from the Mozilla Foundation, Google are going to release their own browser based on Firefox etc.
keep it up, dude. lashdot needs people like you!
It does?
Looks like a mostly pointless document to me. Unless you mean the 4 minor "likely goals" listed that might be in 1.5, 2.0, or 3.0.
I'm a relative outsider to the ins and outs of Firefox (a KDE/Konqueror user), but that page sums up the project as a whole to me. They've gotten too big, too quickly, and can't really cope.
I hope the document is just wildly out of date.
I use FF most of the time, but unfortunately, there's plenty of websites that won't work unless you're using IE. I hate it, but I have no choice.
Evil people don't think they're evil. - George Lucas, Making of Ep III
I think everybody on slashdot is aware that there have been some security problems with FF (I don't have time to hunt for the links, just do a search here). I personally love FF, have since it's infancy, but I can't help but foresee similar problems in the future.
I think the source of the problem is that Mozilla is spreading out too fast. And it's hurting their products. For example, I just had to uninstall and reinstall FF; I'm browsing my fave extensions to reinstall as I write this. A month ago I had to uninstall and reinstall SeaMonkey (the classic Mozilla, which my husband prefers to FF). In both cases, it seems some of the app's files became corrupted.
How many programmers are regularly working with Mozilla? How many on each project? I don't know personally, but I'm betting that most of them are working on multiple projects. And how many Mozilla projects are there? SeaMonkey, Firefox, Thunderbird (best email client I've ever seen, btw), Camino, Sunbird.... am I forgetting any? Probably.
I like the new free opera, but I don't use it much. Opera doesn't have two things that makes the Mozilla browsers invaluable to me - you can turn off software installation and you can get extensions. You have to turn on software installation to install extensions, but otherwise you can turn it off and leave it off, and this helps secure your PC (if you know this, you're probably thinking "duh!", but you'd be surprised how many people using FF don't know).
What's my point? Don't count your chickens before the eggs hatch. Firefox is gaining popularity, and it should, but I'm going to wait until 1.5 is in final release before I begin celebrating. I'm just holding out for hope that these recent spate of problems won't become a long-lasting trend. Only time will tell.
I dream of a better world... one in which chickens can cross roads without their motives being questioned.
Then I suppose the developers should fix the memory management issues with the Windows builds. No other Windows program performs (or doesn't) like Firefox.
... no, that was inserted for the people who would pipe up with "Well duh, if you're running a Celeron 400 with 128 MB of RAM".
As for the specs
I used to think Linux was cool -- then I turned 14.
Anyone else noticing Firefox getting more and more bloated and buggy with every release? I remember it being swift and stable about a year ago (0.7 days?), but now it takes years to load, downloads don't always work, and I simply can't use tabs as it leads to a crash within an hour. I thought the idea behind the Firefox fork was a lighter, speedy alternative to Mozilla, but now Firefix seems to have a pretty alarming rate of feature bloat. I find myself wanting to know what the alternatives to the alternative are now.
Your doing something wrong - right now I only use about 65megs of memory for FF and I've got a few tabs open.
I can't tell you how many problems are user based. I've worked tech support, in business and in family. It pains me so to see people smearing quality software's good name in place of intelligence. No your CD ROM tray is NOT a cup holder. No Firefox does NOT take 200megs of memory. End of story.
Please allow me to hate the creator of the 120-character limit: *HATES*. Thank you.
I think Firefox usage is quite a bit higher than people think. A lot of blogs contain public Sitemeter information that includes browser share. For sites like Instapundit, Daily Kos, or Red State Firefox usage is anywhere from 25-40% of total browsers. My own site has IE just under 50%, Firefox with 35-40%, and Safari hovering around 10% depending on the time of the survey.
Granted, blog readers tend to be somewhat more ahead of the curve than Joe or Jane Sixpack, but they're also indicative of where the market will be a few years down the road. The problem IE and Microsoft faces is that while they have a very high marketshare, their mindshare sucks - everyone uses Microsoft products but only those who take return trips to the Kool Aid bowl particularly like doing it. When an alternative like Firefox comes along that doesn't take a CS degree to use, people start switching, and the stats on more technically-oriented sites bear that out.
Don't you have to download Firefox every time you want to upgrade/patch?
if you're so anti-firefox, why does your "CoMmAnD CeNTeR" have a firefox desktop image?
e sktop.jpg
http://tomchu.com/images/computers/commandcenterd
poser.
(subject says it all)
Makes sense, right? I downloaded the .7x builds, the .8x builds, the RC, the preview, the 1.0, the 1.01, 1.02, 1.03, 1.04, 1.05, 1.06, 1.07. Credit me with a darn good chunk of those millions. Once it gets a decent ability to patch itself I won't have to download it so damn much!
Thanks for that attempt at degrading my abilities/knowledge level. I know well enough what I'm doing, and it seems as if you didn't read my comment through very well.
When I used Firefox, I would use it for days at a time without closing it. At times I would only have one tab open, at others I would have 25 tabs open. My point is that after about 6-7 days of usage like this, closing all tabs does squat in terms of releasing memory. I've had Firefox using up to 400 MB of virtual memory after a week-long session like this. Unacceptable.
I'm doing something wrong just because you started Firefox, loaded a page, then checked Task Manager? Okay there bud -- next time think about the comment, then reply.
PS: The word is "you're", as in "You are doing something wrong".
PPS: What brand of DVD burner do you recommend? I want something with a fast-ejecting tray, so that I may use it as a coffee cup holder without having to wait for it to eject/retract when the boss walks by.
I used to think Linux was cool -- then I turned 14.
I am here to spread the name of the Lord, the one and only, the Holy, OPERA. I know many of my brother and sister slashdotters are browsing the porn. In Opera downloading a whole page of pictures is as easy pressing Ctrl+J. If the files you want to download happen to be Jpegs, type jpg in the Links browser that pops up. Select them all, go to save target as to save to a selected folder, or use quick download to batch download all the files in one shot to a folder you set in your opera Preferences. To do that in Firefox you would need to use Pornzilla.
So many things can be down out the box that in firefox require troublesome extensions. Praise the Opera!
I use Firefox in many Linux and Windows boxes and I haven't had it eating up that much memory. Right now I'm at my workplace using XP and Firefox uses 34 megs of memory out of 512. Admittedly the browser fires up rather slowly, but otherwise I haven't had any major problems with it.
I'm not going to argue about the memory leaks.
However, I find surprising that only Firefox "chugs" when you try to maximise it. It's a very normal process (especially if it takes more than 200 MB of memory) : it indicates the memory used by the program has been swapped to the disk, and used for more useful purposes, like playing a game.
If other applications maximise quickly, that either mean they don't use much memory (as does Trillian I believe, even though I've never used it), or that for somewhat reason they kept using the main memory (Photoshop being also a memory hog). And the last reason is indeed bad.
From an end user perspective, IE7, Opera and Firefox are ALL THE SAME. Why?
1). All feature integrated pop-up blocking
2). All feature Tabbed browsing
3). All open webpages.
4). All have their own specific security holes
So why would I spend the time to download firefox or opera or any other browser for that matter if the one that comes with my OS does what I need. I use IE when I use windows (1% of the time) and firefox when Im in Linux (99% of the time). I'm glad the media hype has gotten Firefox in the mainstream, now can we please work on features for the average non-web programmer that make one browser better then another?.
Mozilla Corp. press release about the 100 million downloads.
There's a hidden treasure in Python 3.x: __prepare__()
The picture is about a year old. Hell, I'm selling that laptop now -- it's been replaced by a 12" iBook. Good little machine, though.
I used to think Linux was cool -- then I turned 14.
I alo feel FF has gotten heavier in the last year or so... On my Mac, I used to use FF more and Safari less because FF was faster in every aspect - applcation start up, rendering, etc. Now, I am not so sure. FF feels quite heavy and I have shifted back to Safari...
Nothing competes with that.
Sorry, that's not a single word reply, is it?
Yeah, I understand that. The thing is, though, that the games I play use about 1 GB tops. I have 2 GB in the system -- that still leaves plenty of room for other stuff.
... well, I've used this PC long enough to know when it's swapping and when it isn't. Generally, even my swap operations are pretty fast (7200 RPM, 8 MB cache, RAID 0). I've had a 700 MB Photoshop.exe process that went into a swap at one point, but the impact on performance was minimal because of how quickly I could retrieve 100 MB off disk.
As for coming in and out of swap
Firefox is doing a lot more than just straight swapping. To be honest with you, I have no idea what it's doing in the 40-60 seconds that it takes to come back up after being minimized. I'm going to blame the UI and/or its toolkit.
I used to think Linux was cool -- then I turned 14.
Man, I don't know why this is modded down. On windows it's true. Mine is 28 windows @ 211,788K. That's more than Outlook which is a big hog. I might just give Opera a try.
It's modded down because it points out a flaw in the precious software of Slashdot fanbois the world over. Here's an example:
;-)
Linux needs to maintain a stable driver API for 2 years+ if it wants to see an influx of hardware manufacturer support.
GNU software suffers from poor documentation in many cases.
OS X is slow.
All of those statements are true, but it doesn't stop the comment from being modded down.
I used to think Linux was cool -- then I turned 14.
The problem is whether you're running Windows, or Linux. In Windows, FF starts leaking like a sieve after you put a few tabs up. Linux, you notice no memory usage that's not normal (about 20-30 megs of memory, tops) and it remains fast and responsive, even after leaving it running for a long time
Under Windows, if I leave a FF browser with two or three tabs open running, and come back maybe 1 1/2 hours later, about half of my system memory is beng hogged by FF. (512 megs, FF reports using 210 of that under the Task Manager in Windows XP Professional)
So, no smearing of names here. It works great for one OS and it just seems to suck under another OS. For all we know it could be something Microsoft is causing. I will admit one thing, FireFox is getting a bit more bloated with each release. Instead of writing patches, why not just re-write the vulnerable code so that it works, and release a new version, not a patch? We may have to wait longer but at least we'll know the code's been "fixed" (and hopefully optimized.)
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
I find that on my website (yes, by my name) the stats are whacked when it comes to Firefox. I'm seeing percentages like 68% firefox. And no, I don't advocate Firefox or have Firefox specific material on the website. I can safely assume that those numbers are not right and something is amis. I blame the prefetcher and the stats package that my webhost comes with.
Even those who arrange and design shrubberies are under considerable economic stress at this period in history.
"Firefox Tops 100 Million Downloads"
So Firefox is now the McDonalds of browsers?
This is in response to all the people that keep saying, "Yeah, but I've downloaded firefox like 5 times myself". On my system, and thousands of others, firefox hasn't even been "downloaded" once. It comes packaged by my distribution (debian). So, all those debian/ubuntu/gentoo/etc users out there that have firefox packaged by their distro are not really being counted at all, unless I'm missing something about how they come to these figures. I wonder how many debian/ubuntu users alone there are that have never manually downloaded the browser and are not being counted.
Same experiance here. It starts out fairly low in memory usage, but after I leave it open for a few days, it starts to hog memory; even if I close all the tabs but one. I wonder if there's some leaks in the tab code, or something similar.
Listen- I like firefox. I'm using it right now. I use it in preference over IE. I lobby for it on my financial web sites.
But the numbers are bogus.
Every patch generates a ton of new downloads.
I download it once and install it on multiple computers. But it patches from each new computer as a new download.
What's important is market share- not some wierd counter of downloads.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
People at the office were reluctant at first when i started to change all of the browsers to firefox but now everyone is happy and i'm happy. we are a big loving family thanks to firefox.
2 main thing that made it possible:
1-find the right themes. bells and whistles. peeps just love that. something that kinda have that Aqua look and they got a new toy to play with. lovely.
2-The IE Browser plug-in. that's the clencher. people complains that some website are IE only. just right click and open in IE.
soon we'll be done and over with the IE foolishness.
But can we talk about the new DUAL CORE DUAL PROC G5's that came out hours ago and still no slashdot article in sight ?!?!?! I'm freakin dying over here. IMAGINE........ an xgrid cluster of those ! Okay I'll wait for TFA now...
music lover since 1969
Chicken and the egg. The Adobe SVG plug in is kinda crufty, especially if your primary browser is not IE.
;) But to answer your question, think of SVG as "poor man's Flash". Static pictures are here today. More dynamic stuff is coming.
The other problem is SVG editors. Personally, I use Inkscape. Right now, I compose a graphic in Inkscape, export to a PNG file, and upload to my web site. I'll dispense with the export step when the state of SVG browser support improves.
Hopefully I'll see some space improvement, too
And to me, on a limited budget, this is a Big Deal.
6.2
"If god did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him" --Voltaire
A year is NOT 0.7 days!
I just tried Opera with a similar # of tabs open. Way different results. There may be a memory leak in the latest FireFox. I don't remember having this problem before, but I am using a few extensions now.
I do agree that 65 MB is not 200 MB. But then again, what exactly is it doing that it needs to consume 65 MB of RAM? Even assuming a completely full default in-RAM cache of 50 MB, that leaves 15 MB.
With my Firefox installation on Linux, it appears that all of the shared libraries plus the firefox binary itself come up to just over 3 MB, and that's including junk beyond just the text sections of each binary, too. That leaves 12 MB. Even considering HTML parse trees, configuration data, and some such, there is no reason for Firefox to be using 12 MB of RAM.
While 12 MB probably isn't much when you consider that the computers of most geeks probably have at least 1 GB of RAM these days, that isn't necessarily the case for regular users. Indeed, many new consumer systems today only include 256 MB of RAM. Often older systems have 128 MB of RAM, if not less. 12 MB does matter at that point, especially when dealing with a behemoth like Windows XP.
When you're trying to get such people to switch to your software, like the Firefox project is doing, you can't afford to degrade their system performance due to wasted memory.
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
I bet the next survey will incorrectly show a decent jump in IE marketshare.
After trying out Opera 8.5, I'm pretty sure I won't be going back to IE6 or Firefox 1.1.x--but I'm looking forward to trying IE7 and Firefox 1.5 when they are released.
There's no sense in remaining loyal to any product--switch whenever a better product comes along if the benefits outweigh the cost of switching. Right now, the benefits of Opera 8.5 (best security, speed, features) outweigh my cost of switching (importing my Firefox bookmarks with couple mouseclicks, getting used to a different GUI, not being able to view browser source code which I never did anyway because it was so damned huge). For others, the costs may be too high because they enjoy tweaking/compiling the browser source code.
I wish the Firefox and IE developers would spend a solid week or an entire month using only Opera 8.5 so they can get some ideas on what to copy or improve. But I must admit, I like cookie management in Firefox the best--Opera provides too many choices for dealing with cookies. And the yellow-highlighting of all matching search words in a page. I wish Opera 8.6 would copy these two Firefox features.
As long as the battle rages on, we the users will benefit from continously improving products--as long as we don't irrationally stick to IE or Firefox or Opera or ? out of blind loyalty. Save the loyalty for human beings--not inanimate objects or software.
Mark my words, there was a huge increase in Opera 8.5 downloads when they released it last month without adware and I bet we'll see a lot of articles talking about IE making a comeback partly as a result of Opera reporting itself as IE to web servers.
Have you considered using K-Meleon instead? It uses the Gecko rendering engine, but has its own native Windows GUI. While I haven't used it in years, perhaps it is better than Firefox performance wise.
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
For all we know it could be something Microsoft is causing.
Actually, I suspect it's something Macromedia (Adobe now I guess) is causing... yeah, the Flash plugin.
I see a dramatic rise in memory usage once I hit a page that uses Flash. I've never seen it eat as much memory as you describe -- on my work PC it usually hovers around 120M of memory (out of 1GB), regardless of how many tabs I have open.
Instead of writing patches, why not just re-write the vulnerable code so that it works, and release a new version, not a patch?
Huh? That makes absolutely no sense. They don't just write a stopgap fix -- they do rewrite the code that has a bug or security vulnerability. And to date they haven't ever released a patch -- every single update has been a full reinstall of the browser (which is absurd, and is finally being fixed in 1.5). Finally, it simply doesn't matter if you issue a new "version" or a "patch". They have the exact same effect -- to completely replace the affected code.
That's a good question. Why *does* it need so much RAM just for viewing a website? I really don't see the need for more than ~20 MB personally. A few MB for the binary (code and data), and data structures, let's say 12 MB for supporting libraries (HTTP, XML, PNG, JPG, what have you), and a few more MB for the actual content + caches. That gives us about 20 MB.
I saw your other suggestion about K-Meleon. I think I'll try that at home -- thanks. Ignoring the silly name, I've heard good things about it from a number of other people.
I used to think Linux was cool -- then I turned 14.
> Firefox needs to be eating up 175MB
I think you may be mis-interpreting your memory usage. I use ~200MB of memory when I'm running KDE, Konqueror, OO.o, Gkrellm2, Kopete, MySQL, Amarok, and all associated libraries and supporting apps. Firefox cannot POSSIBLY use just under what I have for a WHOLE desktop environment.
Also, Windows XP reports Firefox at a lean 31MB right now, with 5 tabs.
Finally, I blame the slowness on XP's VM management. It seems like (rightly or wrongly) it assumes that if something has been minimised for a while, you won't use it any time soon. So it dumps the app in the page file. When you restore it, XP will eventually grab all 31MB or so out of the page file and dump it into memory. That can take a while. I have had new instances of firefox start faster than restoring old instances. It would be really nice if I could tell XP to leave running program in memory until I run out, but alas I cannot.
Hmm... no, I haven't heard of that. To be straight, though, it's not so much the engine that I love as it is, primarily, the Web Developer and similar extensions.
For browsing purposes I use Maxthon because of the gobs of features it has, as well as its speed. For work and developmental purposes I generally keep both Firefox and Maxthon open (Maxthon uses the IE engine).
I would gladly switch, as Firefox has most of the features of Maxthon in some way, shape, or form, but I can't justify it with the memory and slowness problems that I have.
To be fair, though, the slow factor only seems to be a problem after I have had Firefox minimized for a while without using it. The memory problem is pretty consistent, though...
A community-oriented lyrics site
Windows is inherent that it won't allow changes to software unless you have admin rights.
Hopefully it will allow for you to 'log on as' and then install all the updates, at least in Windows.
The price is always right if someone else is paying.
does it mean i can download it now?
Sometimes flash ads in Opera will eat 100% CPU and drive Opera's memory usage up like crazy. If i close that tab (and it's usually slashdot, grr...) then the usage drops to 0% and memory slowly returns to normal. Macromedia Flash viewer seems to definitely have a problem.
Slashdot is proof that Sturgeon's Law applies to mankind.
Take that AMD!
I downloaded Firefox several times, but particularly after it hit 1.0 release status (the initial download and a couple of bug upgrades).
I've ended up staying with Opera. It's just much, much better in the end.
So can we have those stats updated to reflect that my downloads ended up being a waste of time? Just pretend I didn't do it, and we'll all be happier for it. I know I am!
--
Don't like it? Respond with words, not karma.
Sometimes flash ads in Opera will eat 100% CPU
That is definitely a Flash problem. That exact behavior is exhibited on all platforms (Linux, Windows, Mac), in all browsers (take your pick), in various Flash versions.
The fun thing is that it doesn't happen all the time, even for a given platform/OS/browser/flash combination.
My guess is that they have a race condition somewhere deep in the code. It's been around since at least Flash v5, and persists to this day.
Thankfully in Firefox we have the Flashblock extension available, so it's not such a huge problem.
all the SPYWARE, VIRUSES, and other BSWare that YOU have loaded on your machine since a year ago rather than a problem with Firefox???
Yes, these two browsers play off each other more than they do off of IE. Why?
- IE is a horribly out of date browser, it offers little in the way of new features compared to other browsers out there.
- The primary reason IE has the lead in market share isn't because of security or features, it is because IE is already installed on windows machines.
For your average Joe who doesn't think about security and just wants to check the web from time to time, they don't want to go through the hassle of downloading and installing a new browser since they already have one.
That said, for all my friends/family, I have long since gone on their computer and switched them over to firefox. I just slap an IE theme on firefox, swap out a few shortcuts, and blam they are done. They can't tell a single difference between using FF and IE, but behind the scenes they are more secure and have a heck of a lot less spyware problems.
I think more significant isn't that Firefox is in second place, it is that it has 25%+ of the market share in an area where MS has an extreme "monopoly" advantage.
You are who you are, let no one tell you different. But, never close your mind to a new point of view.
And I wanted to tell the FF devs about it, but then I have to register to bugzilla, and Bugmenot was of no use?!
Anyway, in case anyone is curious, the bug is I was trying to upload a 75mb file to megaupload.com, and the upload speed kept tapering off from 50kb/s down to 10kb/s or so, until about 20-30mb, and then I got a "file contains no data" (iirc) message.
Then I tried with IE, and the upload started at 30kb/s, and went up to 40kb/s, and stayed at this speed til the upload was complete.
I could be completly wrong here, but I think the problem could be due to the modular XUL toolkit. In essence, Firefox has to completly reload the app back into main memory before it can display the UI to screen.
Other apps like photoshop, using MFC, can quickly display the UI, and take a few seconds loading the rest of the things into memory (which are not needed for imediate display.)
I am working to spread the firefox browser.
We all know that sex sells.
So try to look at this site http://www.thelovesearch.com/ using Microsoft
Internet Explore. It will try to convince your to use Firefox using
sex appeal.
If we could convince all porn sites to only support Firefox the battle
would be won in a few weeks.
Or am I dreaming now ??
Yeah, Firefox seems a bit bloated to me, these days, as well.
I've been using epiphany over Firefox as my browser of choice lately on my machine at home (Ubuntu Breezy). It seems lighter to me.
Nope. I use Firefox under XP and Linux. It basically sucks equally bad memory-wise. You probably just don't open the same amount of tabs in both. I tend to use the Firefox I have already open and my Firefox survives three or four days on average (with perhaps 500 opened tabs on each). It tends to grow slowly to about 300MB of memory before it dies horribly... same on both platforms.
Actually, it may be slightly worse on Linux. But I'm not sure. I don't have enough data points to justify that. I have always thought that's because the vast majority of Firefox developers are on Windows. It really shows through as there are still bugs with classic window managers such as twm, and there's some auto update stuff in there which never works on Linux, just as an example...
Lemme save you some money in RAM upgrades. Close the friggin program once in a while and you'll be fine. There are bigger problems facing an massively implemented open source web browser than meeting your demands for memory without flexibility on your part. Is hitting Ctl-W really that unacceptable?
P.S. I hate elitist grammarians.
P.S.S. I've thought about my comment, and I'm hitting, 'Preview', then 'Submit'.
Please allow me to hate the creator of the 120-character limit: *HATES*. Thank you.
I downloaded Firefox once upon a time... in fact a couple times, on different machines to try it out. Didn't take me long to figure out I didn't like it, and I still preferred good ol' IE6. So Firefox went out the Window.
I'd be curious as to how many of the 100 million downloads are actually still installed and being used...
It's not just that it's free-as-in-beer now. It's the 8.x family. Somewhere in the early 7's, I grew disgusted with the changes and outright removal of certain things that I had grown to like about Opera.
Before, 6.05 was the last version of Opera that I really liked. Everything between that and 8.0 I truly hated--wand was cool yeah, but I still hated it. Mozilla became my primary browser then.
Now with 8.x, I find myself liking and actually using Opera a lot more. It feels much more like a much-improved 6.x than the 7.x series did. Mozilla's still my primary browser, for now, but Opera's a serious contender for my attention once again. 8.x is MUCH better.
Slashdot - where to disagree, is to be a troll
I reported the crashing 2 1/2 years ago!
6 8
6 0
The answer has always been: "Did you try the latest version, compiled last night? The problem may be fixed."
By the time I can test the latest version, there is a new version. I get the same answer again. That's happened for 2 1/2 years.
Bug 204668, Linux/Windows Reproducible Crash Tests:
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=2046
(Remember that Bugzilla does not accept referrals from Slashdot, so it is necessary to paste that link into your browser, while removing the space inserted by Slashdot.)
See also:
Bugzilla Bug 222660, Firefox 0.8: All instances crash. Memory leaks:
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=2226
This is the same problem, apparently.
I am very thankful to the Mozilla people for all their efforts. Mozilla has changed the world for the better. Can you imagine a world in which we did not have an excellent browser? The world's most intelligent and educated people and leaders need information, and a browser is the window they use to view that information. I've never seen an article which fully described how thankful people are for Mozilla/Firefox, but I often hear thanks after I tell people about it.
However, this is a showstopper bug for me. I often am researching more than one kind of computer hardware. I often have several instances of Firefox open, each with several tabs. When a crash occurs, I lose all my work. (The session saver plugin apparently does not work with the latest Firefox.)
Apparently this bug, which would require some extremely insightful troubleshooting, is not popular with Mozilla people. Apparently no one wants to work on it.
The crashes are associated with high CPU use, sometimes as high as 99% and extremely high memory use. Notice that Firefox never gives back memory. If it is using 200 Megabytes, and all but one window and tab are closed, the memory use will still be 200 Megabytes!
Someone who posted a message about this to another Slashdot story said that the problems appear to be caused by incorrect handling of plugins.
This bug crashes Firefox's TalkBack, so there usually is no useful error reporting.
The problem is the same in the Mozilla browser. I've seen Thunderbird crash that way, also.
Let me get this straight ...
Are you actually justifying Firefox's poor memory management and over-use of memory? Wow. Open-source zealotry just doesn't get any better than that. I have 2 GB of RAM because I *use* that much. I shouldn't have to shut down other programs just to make room for Firefox, which is using 200 MB+ with nothing open -- and I don't. That's why I choose not to use it anymore.
Oh, and I see you added me as a Foe after I replied to your pretentious comment. Waaaah, baby need a diaper?
I used to think Linux was cool -- then I turned 14.
Oh yes, most browsers store images on page fully decompressed. That eats a lot of ram if they aren't good at garbage collecting them agressively.
The certians are waging war with the nucertians, and the empire's military-industrial complex keeps CEOs busy with affairs in the Andromeda galaxy as opposed to your insignificant blue speck.
Also, certians evolved beyond the need for chairs over 5000 years.
No, but *I* was waiting for this Opportunity: /boot, RAID 5 lvm: / /home /var, RAID 0 swap) /usr /opt) /tmp)
2x Opteron 275
3x Hitachi 500G (RAID 5
2x 10,000 RPM 74G (RAID 0 lvm:
4G RAM (2G
2x nVidia 7800 PCIe
<imitation who="Peter Griffin (Family Guy)">It's freakin' sweet.</imitation>
If you aren't just being sarcastic ...
:-(
What a waste. It's all running Linux.
I used to think Linux was cool -- then I turned 14.
and when is /. going to celebrate its one millionth Id?
Are you sure you've turned 14?
Please allow me to hate the creator of the 120-character limit: *HATES*. Thank you.
Yeah, my Firefox is kinda slow to start, say 30 seconds to about 1 minute to load, but of course that's because I'm using Portable Firefox on an USB drive. Occasionally I'll have issues with FF crashing on me when I've been running it for a while, but of course I've enabled caching on the USB drive (against recommendations) and only have 5 meg free on the drive. And Sometimes it drops the internet connection altogether when it's idle for about 3 minutes when I'm using it on my Treo via win-hand anywhere, but it comes right back up when I turn the treo back on (so weird - why does this happen?). So I guess you've convinced me, FIREFOX SUCKS!! I'm going back to IE.
1.Netcraft confirms:In Soviet Russia all your base welcomes a beowolf cluster of CowboyNeal overlords. 2.? 3.Profit!!1!
Nice rebuttal. I win.
Open-source zealot justifying Firefox's hoggish use of RAM: 0
Me: 1
I used to think Linux was cool -- then I turned 14.
We spend so much time obsessing over the little things that we so rarely see the big picture.
I think the parent has got it right.
"I am bleeding, making me the victor!"
Please allow me to hate the creator of the 120-character limit: *HATES*. Thank you.
You're welcome to come back to reality at any time now. You might want to wait for Firefox to finish compiling, though. I hear the latest nightlies have OMG-OPTIMIZED memory management, and no more leaks.
I used to think Linux was cool -- then I turned 14.
Bear in mind (sadly enough) that there are some programmers that don't re-write the code, instead, they write code to control the other code's behavior (this is all too common and it's how I think things get bloated and run less efficiently) and just slap it on top of the original code. Thankfully with open source this isn't that common, but in many proprietary applications you can bet they don't re-write the code (Yes, I'm looking at you Mr. Hefty 1.6 Gig OS Microsoft) in all instances, they just slap a patch over the code.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
[[This will so thoroughly be modded down for trolling, not to mention being disingenuous, off-topic, cranky, ideological, syphilitc, prone to rickets, and an identified source of Dengue Fever, but I'm still gonna say it.]]
...which is precisely why advertisers/marketers absolutely detest popup blockers, etc. They piss and moan about "revenue streams" and the "user base" and all that shit, as if they're blithely happy to dictate to us, the users, what content we will or will not see on a website which is a client of such an advertiser.
... Click here to proceed". It's because site admins just as much as popup advertisers damned well know that advance warning would drive viewers away, thereby decreasing the number of delivered ads, which (big surprise here) is antithetical to what kind of experience a user of a website wants to have.
If a program like Adblock were to become part of the standard firefox package (like pop-up blocking currently is) and also turned on by default to block most ads, whats going to happen to websites that depend on ad revenue to exist?
Those websites would eventually cease to exist, or desist with exploitative, visually obnoxious advertising.
If firefox, or Opera, were to theoretically add ad blocking by default, and in turn advertise their browser as the one that makes all the annoying ads go away, it could really begin to take market share from IE. The bigger fear is that microsoft will then add their own ad blocking feature which would mean that ad blocking would become main stream.
And really, it's about time. What the hell good is using the web if we, the users, are beholden to a site admin just as we are to all the bullshit on television ?
The whole **POINT** of "browsing the World Wide Web" is that a user has complete control over the content that s/he sees next. With even the barest of knowledge, the user can, at will, exert that authority and there isn't a damned thing any given website can do about it.
For the advertisers, it's about money (albeit $0.13 cents per click or what the hell ever); for the users, it's about control. No one tells me what cookies I accept or which ads I see. No one. Period.
The fact that webmasters seem to be the biggest promoter of this, or any alternative browser, seems ironic. Finding that millions of people now have the opportunity to not view my ads, is not exactly good news.
Let me get this straight: You, as a site admin, support your storage/bandwidth costs with ads, while hoping that the very same people whoa re responsible for the bandwidth you're paying for with ads don't get sick of that shit and blow off your site
So Uhhhh, yeah..... No, it's not good news for you. It's bloody delightful news for the rest of us. Ads are obnoxious, exploitative, pushy, wheedling little bastard intrusions upon the very content you want to people to want to see. They alienate users. Period. Nothing will change that.
Why do you think a website which uses popups never warns clients about the use of popups prior to delivery ? It wouldn't be hard to put a little notice thingy on an intro page that says "Notice: *blah* *blah* *blah*
You put yourself in that untenable position, so instead of bitching about irreversible changes, get yourself out. Find another way. Advertisers get no fucking sympathy from me, and I'm a little dumbfounded they get any from anyone.
So yeah, that's why I use Firefox together with some home-brew tools of my own.
There have been many non-technical sites reporting increased Firefox usage. A simple search at Google will give you such results.'
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
It's not just Opera that is capable of that. It's also Konqueror, Netscape, and even (like it or not) Internet Explorer.
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
FuturePower(R) wrote :
(The session saver plugin apparently does not work with the latest Firefox.)
I'm running 1.0.7, with Session Saver 0.2 d1 nightly 28, and it runs fine. Saves my sanity on a regular basis (although if Firefox does start getting unstable, I usually take a safety copy of prefs.js (where SessionSaver stores its open tab information) just in case it gets trashed when FF goes down/gets killed).
The crashes are associated with high CPU use, sometimes as high as 99% and extremely high memory use. Notice that Firefox never gives back memory. If it is using 200 Megabytes, and all but one window and tab are closed, the memory use will still be 200 Megabytes!
Actually, it does seem to give back memory - I've noticed this a few times when opening a bunch of image-heavy tabs, memory usage will soar, but then drop back down again after I close those tabs.
All that said, I have noticed that with lots of tabs open (usually 30-50 tabs in each of 3 windows, for me), opening new tabs (especially if the tab title bar is appearing off the right-hand side of the window), Firefox often freezes for a few seconds (up to 30) with 100% CPU usage, and then settles down (usually).
Cat got your tongue? (something important seems to be missing from your comment ... like the body or the subject!)