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."
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.
IE supports :hover but only on anchors. There are simple Javascript hacks that will allow it to work with other elements though.
So we see what version numbers they plan to use. How about some indication of planned features (svg? css3? smil? Qt? client cert creation? ...)
"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...
Firefox
61.9 %
MS Internet Explorer
19.9 %
www.whitedust.net
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
Then again, think of it this way:
More bugs found (who can honestly predict every issue?) = more bugs fixed by (team|community)
More fixes = more patches released without some stupid schedule
I think of this more as a way of saying "Go us!" and by 'us', I mean the users, supporters, contributors. We're smarter with our security practices and more active in making a good thing better. Not every FF user fits that mold, but it's more typical than IE. That's worth a little more than bugs in my opinion. Nobody can make something COMPLETELY error-free, but we do something about it. Those downloads reflect community efforts.
Perfecting Discordia
www.stevenvansickle.com
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.
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
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'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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
The main reason we want you to register before filing a bug is so we can ask followup questions if we can't reproduce the bug. A secondary reason is that requiring registration decreases the number of bug reports where reporters don't bother spending the 2 minutes it takes to make a bug report useful.
The shareholder is always right.
Have you been using the same profile ever since the 0.7 days? If so, try deleting it and creating another one.
I had a profile that I'd been dragging around since 0.9.something. It had gone mysteriously rotten somewhere along the way, causing instability, problems with form submission, and other assorted hilarity. I moved it out of the way and started afresh, copying my bookmarks across from the old profile, and everything was just fine again.
This is a bug, of course. Profiles shouldn't spontaneously corrupt themselves and break the browser. But hey, nothing in this world is perfect. My guess would be that one or more of the extensions I use had something to do with it; I do use rather a lot of them.
-Stephen