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Firefox Tops 100 Million Downloads

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the shop-smart-shop-f-mart dept.

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."

7 of 349 comments (clear)

  1. usage on the way up too? by jkind · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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~
  2. Free As In Beer - Opera by ergo98 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

    1. Re:Free As In Beer - Opera by real_smiff · · Score: 4, Interesting

      yup, Opera is now my main browser. i jumped to it because i got fed up with Fx's memory leaks. funnily enough, i find similar problems with Opera, but its not *as* slow. i can't figure out whats causing memory use to keep climbing in both browsers yet. also like you i miss some plugins, but most of the vital stuff like mouse gestures and tab controls is in there, and its not so bad (lack of adblock or other content control) if you run everything through a proxy (proxomitron) anyway. i should add i do a ridiculous amount of web browsing and have both browsers open most of the time. i can't really decide which i like more, they're both great. i'm sure Opera is more normal-person (i was going to say newbie, but thats unfair) friendly though, so most people i set up get Opera now. and firefox is more flexible with its extension setup so probably better for geeks and people with "special needs".

      --

      This is my Sig, this is my Gun. One is for Slashdot and one is for Fun.

  3. Roadmap? by temojen · · Score: 3, Interesting

    So we see what version numbers they plan to use. How about some indication of planned features (svg? css3? smil? Qt? client cert creation? ...)

  4. The Next Next Big Thing?! by nickdot · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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?

  5. Firefox on 4 month decline at w3schools.com by I'm+Don+Giovanni · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.
    http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.a sp

    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
  6. Hard to deploy in a network by rduke15 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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).