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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
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.
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.
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
..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 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.
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.
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.