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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.
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? ...)
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.
"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...
It's my birthday today!
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
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
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.
..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).
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.
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.
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.
See this mozillazine article. The counter doesn't include downloads from the software update system.
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?.
If you have used the Firefox update system it counts as one download (the first one), if you have manually downloaded and installed it each time, that count as eight (not seven, obviously) downloads.
There's a hidden treasure in Python 3.x: __prepare__()
IIRC they don't count downloads with a Firefox user-agent. I'm not 100% sure of that, but I recall reading that somewhere.
If that's correct, that means it depends on whether you used Firefox or another browser to download the updated installer.
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 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.
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The shareholder is always right.