Firefox Community, Sickly Out of Control

darlingbuddy writes "After users started reporting Firefox's 150 million+ downloads, this article mentions why it's a bad move on the community's part. The author writes, "I'm proud of the community that pitched in enough donations for Firefox to get a full-page advertisement in The New York Times print edition, and I'm delighted to see them think of creative ideas for promotion, but reporting total downloads every so often and immaturely degrading Internet Explorer is ridiculous. The thing with these numbers is that they are misleading at best, and the only thing they accomplish is immature fanboyism. It's a fact that Internet Explorer is inferior to Firefox with its extensive collection of extensions and ability to support qualified web standards, but does the community need to resort to using third-class promotional tactics with total downloads number?"

Comments

I call troll

[bj8rn]

This story is nothing but a blatant troll. It has no content other than "the Firefox community are immature". The only proof the author offers to support his claim is that "the number of total Firefox downloads is misleading". I can't really tell what one has to do with the other, as the author has sort of jumped to the conclusion...nay, not even that. He's first come up with the idea that the members of the Firefox community are immature, and only then tried to come up with "arguments" to prove this.

Personally, I can't see anything wrong with the promotional tactics "criticized" in the article. It is, after all, an easier way to get the message across than the ones the author of the article suggests ("Release updates, innovative extensions and add interesting features (not necessary by default) to promote with value", which, while a good thing, is hardly a good way to promote Firefox).

Yeah, I know, I shouldn't have fed the troll. But it felt so bloody good I just couldn't help myself :7

Re:I call troll

[Bogtha]

Personally, I can't see anything wrong with the promotional tactics "criticized" in the article. It is, after all, an easier way to get the message across than the ones the author of the article suggests

There's one crucial difference: honesty. I don't think that the ends justify the means. I think Firefox is a much better browser than Internet Explorer, as a web developer I wish people would switch, and as a user I wish web developers paid more attention to it. But I'm not going to parrot a meaningless figure in the attempt to convince people of its popularity, and when I see other people doing so, I think less of them for it.

If you accept that download figures are meaningless (and I don't se you arguing that point), then what on earth is the point of making a big fuss over them, if not to mislead people?

Re:I call troll

[deanj]

Any browser number out there is misleading anyway, Firefox, IE, or otherwise. It's the number of users that matters.

Think of how many computers each person uses, and how many firefox initial installations that counts for. Then add the upgrades, which are sometimes new downloads.

They should just keep improving the browser, and let their work speak for itself. It's been working well so far.

Re:I call troll

[drgonzo59]

Good point. I wish there was a way to moderate stories. Go below 1, and "bye-bye" -- story is gone from the front page.

And what is so wrong with reporting how many times the browser has been downloaded? There is obviously some correlation between the number of downloads and the number of users using it. One way to get people to try something is to tell them that a million other people just like them, already did it. It shows that the product works. Criticism (and self criticism) is useful only when it is meaningful and not just "OMG, teh Firef0x people iz s000 imature! We n33d to b3 teh profeshin5l like B1ll Gat3z!!!!!"

Re:I call troll

[F_Scentura]

Good god, yes. I wish there was some wat to vote down these stories.

Re:I call troll

[Pneuma ROCKS]

Yes. Furthermore, the actions of a few cannot be generalized as the "Firefox community". I'm a regular contributor at SFX (spreadfirefox) and there's a lot of people who help spread the word in amazing ways. But there are also a couple of members, every now and then, that come up with stupid childish ways of "forcing" people into using Firefox. Some will add a persistent nagging popup that IE won't filter, telling their visitor to download Firefox. Others will just go on and on ranting about IE and Microsoft. In my opinion, Firefox and Mozilla have enough merit to stand on their own. People don't need to bad mouth IE to convince others to use Firefox. IE was good a long time ago, and it will be significantly better when version 7 is released. I will still prefer Firefox for several reasons, but I won't mind people switching back. I think the Firefox community should not (and so far is not) pushing Firefox to the users, but rather promotion freedom of choice. More importantly, we're showing people they have a choice. The download numbers are just a good way to establish milestones and celebrate within the community. They may not mean much, but I don't see how they are in any way trolling.

Re:I call troll

[sbrown123]

There's one crucial difference: honesty.

Mozilla is honest. The figure they give is how many downloads they have counted . Now, how many of those downloads were from unique users? Thats a mystery there.

McDonalds has for years advertised they have served "millions" and later "billions" of people. Interestingly, they never spent the time to figure out that some of those billions served were sometimes the same people going back for more (sick bastards). But that fact doesn't matter since the truth is that McDonalds "served" that many people, not "served" that many unique people. And McDonalds is an advertising monster! They thought advertising the number served was a good idea. Probably 99.9% of Americans today know of that particular advertisement. That advertisement campaign was sooo good we all remember it! So, your idea that number counting in advertisements is not an effective means of promotion you are really, really wrong in that assumption.

Re:I call troll

[bj8rn]

If you accept that download figures are meaningless (and I don't se you arguing that point), then what on earth is the point of making a big fuss over them, if not to mislead people?

I agree that the download figures are meaningless. However, I can't see how quoting these figures is worse than any other trick used in advertising. Of course one can keep using this kind of rhetorics for only so long; at one point, they will have to come up with something new, at which point the community will start chanting the new slogan. But I still can't see how this is a sign of them being immature.

Re:I call troll

[LiquidCoooled]

According to the slash tag beta thingy, we will be able to identify both articles and comments using our own tags.

Some will have meaning in the system:


We're going to build the next generation of moderation on top of tags. That means we're going to poach your namespace. Some tags will have a substantive effect on the system right from the start (or very soon). Our article tagger will know about tags like "dupe" or "typo". When we roll out tagging on comments, we will teach it "troll" and "informative". These tags can have a meaning in the system. And when you come up with ways of using tags that we haven't anticipated, we will bring them into the system.


Hopefully this will mean we can reduce troll/fud/dupe articles from full items down to identified mini ones or even removed completely.

Back ontopic, I agree with you that this article is complete FUD.

Re:I call troll

[Anonymous Coward]

I agree with you totally. But another interesting thing comes to mind. MS has a solid number of ie installations (> number of MS Windows installations). It cannot be uninstalled, so they are pretty sure the number is ok or even bigger if you count the pirated copies of windows. Now, me the below-average web designer who is lazy to check my code on every browser will safely assume that a good percentage of people's computers have ie. How is firefox gonna alarm me that I am an idiot? They'll report the total downloads. 150 million is a respectfull number of computer savvy individuals, so if I have any brains in my thick skull, I better check my code against firefox. So the editor could be a common troll, or he could be a troll with an agenda, attacking the way firefox reports the world of its growth...

Re:I call troll

[KarateExplosions]

And then the question becomes... Is McDonald's more immature for advertising how many billions they've served (obviously meaning burgers, not people), or for having a clown for a spokesman?

Re:I call troll

[toofast]

Actually, McDonalds doesn't claim to have served "people" - they simply claim "xx billions served". In this case, I think it's more logical to assume they're refering to orders.

As long as Mozilla do like McDonalds - claim "millions of downloads", not "millions of people downloaded" they'll be okay.

Re:I call troll

[Bogtha]

Mozilla is honest. The figure they give is how many downloads they have counted.

It's not stating how many downloads there have been that is dishonest. It's issuing press releases like this about it that is dishonest.

Pretend you know nothing about HTTP and distribution methods, and read that press release.

Firefox adoption numbers have exceeded expectations with more than 100 million downloads

Do you really think that isn't misleading? That it doesn't make the average person think that there are 100 million users?

Our community of more than 100,000 Firefox developers, testers, and grassroots marketers, is rejuvenating Web browsing, which is why millions of new users make the jump to Firefox every week. Spread Firefox members look forward to the next 100 million downloads as they mobilize for the exciting new release of Firefox 1.5.

Where did this "millions of new users every week" figure come from? Is it directly taken from the download figures? 100 million downloads over the course of a year is about 2 million per week. It certainly looks as if they are equating downloads with new users to me.

Now bring back your memories of HTTP and distribution methods. Read that press release again, and ask yourself why the big fuss over some arbitrary figure that doesn't correspond to adoption levels. Why is this worthy of a press release, if not to mislead?

Re:I call troll

[GeorgeMonroy]

Exactly. End of thread. Move along folks. It is done.

Re:I call troll

[AviLazar]

He's first come up with the idea that the members of the Firefox community are immature, and only then tried to come up with "arguments" to prove this.

Well, I can't comment on the article itself - since it has been /.'d, but I can say this...in argument you typically make your premise then you go on to prove it. It would be odd to make your proof and then your premise. If your statement is correct, then the author took the proper method of writing his article. First he says "Wa wa wa" then he says "wa wa wa because of this proof" Now this is not saying he didn't do a poor job in the proof department (again I haven't read the article) but according to your statement, he is correct.

Re:I call troll

[Zeinfeld]

Good god, yes. I wish there was some wat to vote down these stories.

I wish that there was a way to eliminate the editors entirely and put everything on autopilot. Let the readers choose the stories, let the readers decide what topics are important.

But this is an example of the good side of having editors. Usually Slashdot is non-stop pumping for open source. It is the Fox News or the Air America of Open Source software. There may have been a point to that stance in the 1990s. Today it gets a little tiresome.

I think that it is a mistake for Firefox to mention IE for the same reason that the Oscars presenters should not have mentioned the word DVD all night: running down the competition makes you look cheap and scared.

I never ever mention my competition in an interview. If I am asked a direct question I tell the interviewer the competitor will have to speak for themselves, then I bridge to the positive message I want to get out.

I regularly attend meetings with firefox developers and IE developers in the same room. You would be amazed at how well everyone gets on. If you talk to Linus or any of the people at the center of the successful OSS projects of the past ten years it is amazing how reasonable everyone is in an industry which does not exactly have a reputation for reasonableness.

There are well known ultras of course, but they tend not to write code. I can only think of one well known ultra who produced a significant body of code and that was a long time ago.

Ultras are a problem for every political movement. People think that the way to get attention is to be as extreme and as uncompromising as possible. If you are a libertarian, a leftie, an environmentalist you soon learn how easy it is to play that particular game.

Re:I call troll

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, I can't comment on the article itself - since it has been /.'d, but I can say this...in argument you typically make your premise then you go on to prove it. It would be odd to make your proof and then your premise. If your statement is correct, then the author took the proper method of writing his article. First he says "Wa wa wa" then he says "wa wa wa because of this proof" Now this is not saying he didn't do a poor job in the proof department (again I haven't read the article) but according to your statement, he is correct.

See, you can't know this because of the slashdotting, but the problem is the guy actually said "Wa wa wa." Kind of a weak premise.

Re:I call troll

[aexiphixion]

maybe the author was just trying out his new "jump to conclusions" mat?

Re:I call troll

[Bogtha]

I wish that there was a way to eliminate the editors entirely and put everything on autopilot. Let the readers choose the stories, let the readers decide what topics are important.

This is exactly how Digg operates. Unfortunately, you are overestimating just how useful other readers are in determining which topics are important. Turns out, most people are idiots, and this is reflected in the stories that make it to the front page. The only real difference with Slashdot is that you can hold somebody accountable for the idiocy.

I think a hybrid approach would be better. Let Digg-style voting filter the unpopular articles away, and then let a group of site editors fix the writeup and decide which make it to the front page.

Re:I call troll

[triptolemus]

Agreed, Gundeep Hora is a tool.

Re:I call troll

[bj8rn]

"The Firefox community are a bunch of immature fanbois" hardly qualifies as a correct premise in my book, as I can't see how you can prove a statement like this. Had he simply said that he found the Firefox ads immoral as the use of statistics was misleading, it'd have been something he could have made arguments for or against that I could have agreed or disagreed with. But it seems to me that his intention was simply to rant about how the Firefox community suck, not to make a proper argument for or against something.

Re:I call troll

[flyingsquid]

Do you really think that isn't misleading?

Breaking news: advertisement misleading, report at 11.

Re:I call troll

[muhcashin]

I've downloaded Firefox over 10 times in 6 months. Either for new systems or when I format my hardrive because I screwed it up. Do those count?

Re:I call troll

[Eivind]

You don't get the point. We all know that lots of advertising is immoral, misleading, immature, bullshit.

You can't argue that something is OK because it's similar to something else that's *NOT* OK.

Unless, offcourse, you subscribe to "It's ok to be evil as long as the other guy is too", or "aslong as we can be favourably compared to McD we're ok." or "sure we're lying, but that's common in advertising, so it's ok" or some other such nonsense.

"Millions of new users every week" *is* misleading. It's simply not true. There are about 2 million *downloads* a week, but atleast half of those are likely to be existing users upgrading or installing on multiple machines.

So, it's a lie. And that's nok ok -- not even if the other guys are lying too.

Re:I call troll

[nead]

Do you really think that isn't misleading? That it doesn't make the average person think that there are 100 million users?

Do you really believe that average persons actually read press releases, much less know anything about FireFox or download statistics?

The people that consume these press releases know exactly what the FireFox boys are up to. The notion that they are somehow misleading people is a fallacy.

Poor MS bigots, can't take a little of your own medicine eh?

Re:I call troll

[Zeinfeld]

This is exactly how Digg operates. Unfortunately, you are overestimating just how useful other readers are in determining which topics are important. Turns out, most people are idiots, and this is reflected in the stories that make it to the front page. The only real difference with Slashdot is that you can hold somebody accountable for the idiocy.

I think that the problem there are the layout of the site and the use of direct democracy as the basis for choosing stories. I think it is pretty clear that the Slashdot Karma system would collapse pretty soon if everyone had mod points all the time. Limiting the mod points (but not too much) is critical. Limiting the number of stories is critical if there is going to be a useful conversation in comments.

I think that you need to have structures in place that encourage accountability and excellence.

Re:I call troll

[ratboy666]

Thank you. I wish I had read your response before reading the article.

The article itself was very badly written, or badly edited. Looks like a sophomoric effort, at best.

I think Gundeeps main complaint is that a Firefox installation, if abandoned, is counted as a Firefox installation (download).

I suspect that Internet Explorer are counted on units shipped and downloaded as well, making the entire point moot.

And, as you were, here I am, stuck in the trollnes of it all.

Ratboy

Re:I call troll

[bj8rn]

"Millions of new users every week" *is* misleading. It's simply not true.

I wasn't aware that they used this slogan to promote Firefox. I must say that this is where I would draw the line between what's ok and what's not. For me, it is ok to boast with "150,000,000 downloads", but talking about "millions of new users every week" would probably already be a lie. And no, I would not be ok with this -- not even if we were talking about McDonalds.

Re:I call troll

[srw]

Where did this "millions of new users every week" figure come from? Is it directly taken from the download figures? 100 million downloads over the course of a year is about 2 million per week. It certainly looks as if they are equating downloads with new users to me.

Can you come up with a better way to estimate "new users"? I, for one, installed Firefox for over 600 users from a single download. Maybe there's more than 2 million new users per week. (I suspect there were, at the time of that article, as simply averaging it out over a year is just plain silly. We all know it hit a frenzy for a while, and has probably slowed down now.)

Re:I call troll

[gEvil (beta)]

Granted, it's not strictly a tech site, but Newsvine seems to be doing a great job of combining various elements of Digg, /., and some other news sites. And the devs constantly read the posted articles and comments and are more than happy to take constructive criticism. As I said, it's a general news site, but there are 'technology' and 'science' categories over there, so let's get the ball rolling and turn it into a slashdot-killer. : p

Re:I call troll

[Bogtha]

Do you really believe that average persons actually read press releases

No, I think average people read average news stories from average tech reporters who read these press releases.

The people that consume these press releases know exactly what the FireFox boys are up to.

You give average tech reporters far too much credit. But in the interests of clarification, what exactly are the Firefox boys up to, according to you? And if average tech reporters can see right through the bullshit, why bother trying to mislead them in the first place? Is dishonesty forgivable when it's not effective?

Poor MS bigots, can't take a little of your own medicine eh?

I just said "I think Firefox is a much better browser than Internet Explorer, as a web developer I wish people would switch, and as a user I wish web developers paid more attention to it." Are those the words of an MS bigot? Can you actually accept criticism of your favourite software, or do you write criticism off to some conspiracy against it?

Re:I call troll

[erveek]

This story is nothing but a blatant troll. It has no content other than "the Firefox community are immature". The only proof the author offers to support his claim is that "the number of total Firefox downloads is misleading". I can't really tell what one has to do with the other, as the author has sort of jumped to the conclusion...nay, not even that. He's first come up with the idea that the members of the Firefox community are immature, and only then tried to come up with "arguments" to prove this.

Sure he has proof. The Firefox community is immature because they're the most immature bunch of immatures to ever immature. Duh.

Re:I call troll

[Bogtha]

Can you come up with a better way to estimate "new users"?

Are you seriously suggesting that incorrect numbers with unknown accuracy are better than no numbers?

My "better way" is simple: don't issue a misleading press release. Mozilla.org don't have the numbers, so they shouldn't substitute known invalid numbers in their place. They didn't need the download numbers as an excuse to issue a press release, it was Firefox's anniversary. They could have kept it general without referring to download numbers.

Maybe there's more than 2 million new users per week.

Maybe there are. But what difference does that make? Would it be okay for Mozilla.org to issue a press release they know is misleading just because, unknown to them, their numbers are lower than they should be? Even if by some massive coincidence the number of downloads and the number of users exactly coincided, it would still be wrong, because Mozilla.org wouldn't know that.

Reading Socrates' thoughts on justified true belief might give you some perspective on this. My objection is not on the grounds that I believe that the numbers are lower, my objection is that I believe that the numbers are unknown, and that Mozilla.org are making unsupportable, misleading claims to the contrary.

Re:I call troll

[VStrider]

"This story is nothing but a blatant troll."

Absolutely. Here's some more trolls brought to you by cooltechzone:

Is it wrong to love MS?
Linux is doomed, Thanks to MS.

Either cooltechzone hires trolls, or maybe they cann't resist Bill's checks?

Re:I call troll

[Eivind]

They didn't use this claim as a "slogan", however the sentence is a direct quote from the last paragraph of the latest press-release. I agree. It's fine to say "100 million downloads" if you really had that many downloads, it's not the fault of Firefox that many people are unable to interpret a correct, plain sentence.

But claiming that you've got "millions of new users every week" is a bald-faced lie. They don't. Depending on your assumption they may or may not have half a million new users a week, on average. But they certainly don't have "millions" and "every week".

Re:I call troll

[Fordiman]

You know what I do? I divide any number SpreadFirefox give me by the number of times I personally have downloaded firefox (about 40 so far).

So, 'millions of new users every day' changes to 'tens of thousands of new users each day'

Re:I call troll

[AviLazar]

You may not call it a correct premise, but it is a correct premise. And even though he may not have proved this premise, it just means he failed to prove his argument. Maybe he was just ranting, I am not arguing this, his symantecs were correct.

Re:I call troll

[Fordiman]

Phrases like that are a hedge against the potential that a reporter will just copy a press release to print.

No, no, I'm not going to explain this. Seriously, you think that just 'cos its open source, they don't have dishonest, despicable marketing humans working for them?

Really. Naive.

Re:I call troll

[LaughingJack]

I've downloaded Firefox over 10 times in 6 months. [...] Do those count?

They are distinct downloads so, yes, they did count. It's not easy to know how many distinct users downloaded something. If you ask a e-mail, somebody could use many distinct adresses to download it or use a service like Mailinator. The IP adress is not usable either because many Internet users (like me) have dynamic IP adresses. A cookie is out of question for obvious reasons. Any ideas people?

Re:I call troll

[Fordiman]

"Would it be okay ... to issue press release they know is misleading just because, unknown to them, their numbers are lower than they should be?"

I'm confused... they know, but don't know?

Re:I call troll

[Fordiman]

I believe this is called moral imperialism.

And we all know how amoral it is to be an imperialist.

So be quiet.

Re:I call troll

[Lars T.]

I think that it is a mistake for Firefox to mention IE for the same reason that the Oscars presenters should not have mentioned the word DVD all night: running down the competition makes you look cheap and scared.

Beg your pardon? How is the DVD competition to the movie makers? Or are the Oscars presented by the cinema owners all of a sudden?

Sure, the studios would like you to see a movie at the cinema a couple of times first, and then buy at least one DVD (plus the special edition).

Re:I call troll

[Bogtha]

If you know that numbers you have are inaccurate, and you don't know how inaccurate they are, then you can't know whether the real numbers are higher or lower than the numbers you have.

Re:I call troll

[Anonymous Coward]

At microsoft if you don't tell 20 lies by lunch you get fired. Sometimes you have to get down into the slime to battle the scum.

Re:I call troll

[tsm_sf]

If you accept that download figures are meaningless (and I don't se you arguing that point), then what on earth is the point of making a big fuss over them, if not to mislead people?

Whatever gave you the impression that they're meaningless? This is something that neither you nor the author (same person?) discuss beyond "a download isn't a person". It's an accepted metric referenced time and again by company after company, and NOW suddenly it's a problem?

I note that wikipedia has a busted entry for idee fixe. This article would be a good reference.

Re:I call troll

[Fnkmaster]

Citing Socrates' thoughts on truth in a discussion about marketing and PR is absurd. It's a press release. It's marketing tripe. Just because Mozilla is a non-profit doesn't mean they are above marketing. As another poster pointed out, McDonald's claims billions and billions served, and it's equally ambiguous and potentially "misleading".

Marketing material is supposed to convince you to use a product. Certain markets exhibit inherent features known as demand-side increasing returns. Browsers are an example of such a market. In these markets, gaining market share by convincing users of the inevitability of your market share gain is actually the most logical strategy.

Clearly if you believe that strict honesty is a moral absolute, then you must inherently oppose any and all marketing efforts for any and all products. I would imagine it would be hard to be successful in a capitalist world with that sort of belief system.

If Mozilla can convince people that Firefox is dominating, and therefore Firefox ends up being successful, then I'm all for it, since I think that outcome is far preferable to the alternative of Microsoft domination.

Re:I call troll

[Anonymous Coward]

Can you come up with a better way to estimate "new users"?

Track the number of users updating your product, instead of the number of users downloading your product. Whereas downloads will give you an - highly - inflated numbers of users, tracking update stats will give you a - underrated, but verfiable - better measure of how many people are actually actively using it. Mozilla currently dumps a significant number of update downloads in with the general download stats thereby making them even more useless for anything but marketing purposes.

As for tracking new users: if X users patch to v1 and Y users patch to v2 then your net gain (or loss) across that period of time is Y - X. The real number of users will of course be higher than that, but noone is going to jump and create a fuss about underestimates.

(Off-topic: if you don't believe updates counts as new downloads then just look at any of the few sites that track the number of downloads across time and you'll see a rather large spike for every release date)

Re:I call troll

[fatboy]

There's one crucial difference: honesty.

They honestly report *HOW MANY DOWNLOADS* they have had.

If you accept that download figures are meaningless (and I don't se you arguing that point), then what on earth is the point of making a big fuss over them, if not to mislead people?

It's simply a metric how how many people have downloaded the software. Like WinZip (158,914,773 downloads) or Spybot Search and Destroy (74,435,719 downloads). I have not seen a big fuss, other than a little celebration. So what. Let those folks celebrate.

Re:I call troll

[Anonymous Coward]

Where did this "millions of new users every week" figure come from? Is it directly taken from the download figures? 100 million downloads over the course of a year is about 2 million per week. It certainly looks as if they are equating downloads with new users to me.

Yeah, what is with that? When I download Mozilla products I only download it once and install it on all my machines. All the Linux distros do the same thing, and they're completely ignoring them in their numbers! I wouldn't be surprised if Mozilla is on 1 BILLION computers! There are more computers than people, afaik...

Re:I call troll

[rpdillon]

Ah, yes, but I don't accept that the download figures are meaningless. They are simply suggestive of a trend, and should not be taken as gospel, that's all.

Thinking less of someone because they choose to promote something they like by reinforcing that it is popular seems a bit odd. But I won't think less of you for it. =)

Seriously though, the number is far from meaningless. First of all, though many people download multiple times, there are many people that are users who don't ever download. The big examples I like to cite are people who use Debian, Fedora, Gentoo, Ubuntu, and other prominant Linux distributions that use a package management system. Obviously, there are also the corporate intranet cases where one person downloads and mirrors it locally to 50 others. So yes, the number is inaccurate in both directions (doesn't count large groups, other groups counted twice). But that simply doesn't equate with it being "meaningless". For example, Dillo can't claim to have 150 million downloads...Firefox is more popular than Dillo.

My last point regards the article: this guy is trolling, plain and simple. He starts off with:

I agree that Firefox has literally changed the way we browse the Internet...

and then wraps up with this:

I wouldn't be surprised if it becomes another over-hyped application with nothing of value.

So, ummm, which is it? I realize he says "becomes" in the second quote, but honestly, you either think it changed the way we browse or you think it is over-hyped and has no value. It isn't going to go from one to the other because I promote Firefox by advertising that it has been downloaded 150,000,000 times.

Anyway, kind of surprised this made Slashdot front page, but hey, it wouldn't be the first time I wanted to mod an entire article (-1, Troll).

Re:I call troll

[Feanturi]

Interestingly, they never spent the time to figure out that some of those billions served were sometimes the same people

At one time, years ago, their sign said "Over 50 billion served". Do you really think that they, and the people driving by those signs, are that bad at math, given that the figure was over 10 times the entire world's human population at the time? Nowadays it just says "billions" because they got tired of changing the sign all the time whenever Bill Clinton wanted lunch.

Re:I call troll

[Dasch]

A troll on Slashdot? What have the world come to?!

Re:I call troll

[Frenchman113]

Why would you have downloaded firefox 40 times except to bump up download figures though?

Re:I call troll

[Bogtha]

Thinking less of someone because they choose to promote something they like by reinforcing that it is popular seems a bit odd. But I won't think less of you for it. =)

Why would you? I am more specific than that. I think less of people because they do that in a stupid, meaningless way. I think it's a bit silly to be a cheerleader for a particular piece of software, but it's not that that I have a problem with. If you want to be a cheerleader, then point out how good it is, what features it has, what benefit it can bring. Don't resort to "[x] million people use it", especially when you don't know that.

So yes, the number is inaccurate in both directions (doesn't count large groups, other groups counted twice). But that simply doesn't equate with it being "meaningless".

No, you're right, I should have said "meaningless for the purpose of determining popularity". It's certainly meaningful if you want to tune the download servers or pay the bandwidth bill.

For example, Dillo can't claim to have 150 million downloads...

Why not? It's not that I believe that they do, I just want justification for that statement.

Firefox is more popular than Dillo.

On what basis do you make this claim? How are you measuring popularity?

My last point regards the article: this guy is trolling, plain and simple. He starts off with:

I don't see how that makes him a troll. He knows full well that any article of that nature is going to be taken as an attack by the mindless fanboys, so he has to prefix the article with adoration for Firefox to insulate himself from attacks. Notice how I'm being accused of being an "MS bigot" because I dare criticise Mozilla.org? But because that ego stroking isn't part of the article per se, he forgot about it at the end when he complained about hype.

Re:I call troll

[occidentaltourist]

Elucidating what constitutes "trollism" is not the same as feeding the troll.

If you had attempted to engage Hemos in a tête á tête so as to persuade him to your point of view, then you would have been "feeding the troll". Sure, you skirted the boundary by firing a few emotively reactionary shots across the bow...but the balance of your post, i.e. calling "troll" and giving clear reasons why, is simply commentary.

Now, let's all cleanse ourselves by immersing our souls and our fingertips in a good ol' purifying flame war.

Re:I call troll

[dotgain]

Installing it on your parent's computer. Installing it on your sister's computer. Installing it on your work PC... and so on. Repeat when a new version is released.

Re:I call troll

[Anonymous Coward]

It's called Kuro5hin.org

Re:I call troll

[PygmySurfer]

How many releases of Firefox have there been? It stands to reason one would download each new release, in order to stay up to date. In addition, one often has to redownload it when configuring another machine, or setting up a machine after having reformatted it.

I've no idea how many times I've downloaded Firefox, but 40 doesn't seem like an unreasonable number at all.

Re:I call troll

[c_spencer100]

After reading a few of your posts on this story, you are officially a friend of mine! I'd buy you a beer if someone created some kind of e-voucher for that. I'd call it BeerPal (patent pending)

Re:I call troll

[Bogtha]

Citing Socrates' thoughts on truth in a discussion about marketing and PR is absurd.

Why? I was drawing a distinction between knowledge and coincidental belief. If you haven't thought about such issues, they can easily be confused. Socrates is a good place to start dealing with that confusion. Where is the harm in mentioning that?

Clearly if you believe that strict honesty is a moral absolute, then you must inherently oppose any and all marketing efforts for any and all products.

You are making an assumption that is not true. You are assuming that all marketing is inherently dishonest. That is not the case. Firefox have plenty of marketing options without resorting to dishonesty.

If Mozilla can convince people that Firefox is dominating, and therefore Firefox ends up being successful,

Firstly, Firefox is already successful as far as I'm concerned. You're going to have to define "success".

Secondly, that's a non-sequitur. Firefox's success is dependent upon convincing people that it is dominating? Since when?

...then I'm all for it, since I think that outcome is far preferable to the alternative of Microsoft domination.

That's a false dichotomy. Why must there be only two options - dishonesty and Microsoft domaination? You don't think people can compete with Microsoft unless they are dishonest? Why?

Re:I call troll

[Anonymous Coward]

Watch your mouth there, your wiener kids are listening!

Re:I call troll

[poopdeville]

Knowledge isn't just justified true belief. Read the section on "Gettier Cases" in the Wikipedia epistemology article. Or better yet, check out plato.stanford.edu.

Re:I call troll

[jab3]

Reading Socrates' thoughts on justified true belief might give you some perspective on this.

Before you quote Socractes and JTB, read Gettier's response to it. Give you some persepective on the problems of JTB and epistemology.

Re:I call troll

[Anonymous Coward]

Notice how I'm being accused of being an "MS bigot" because I dare criticise Mozilla.org?

Wait, I thought criticizing Mozilla made you an Opera fan? Now it's Microsoft? I've got to update my score card!

Re:I call troll

[ConceptJunkie]

McDonald's never claimed a count of people served. The traditional sign was:

McDonald's Hamburgers
Over XXX Sold

Where XXX used to be a number, but they stopped that years ago, probably because it was too expensive to change the signs all the time. Regardless, they can claim that if the number is 100 billion (probably much higher) that they have, in fact, served a hamburger to a person more 100 billion times. It's a consumable item. If I eat 100 hamburgers, I've consumed a lot more, but if I've downloaded Firefox 100 times (which is quite possible seeing as how I've been using it since about 0.4), I'm still only using one program.

Troll or not, the article has a good point. Nonetheless, you can't have 150 million downloads of anything unless it's a significant piece of software or you are seriously cheating by having one machine constantly redownloading the package from another over a seriously fast link... but only people like the Scientologists would do crap like that.

Re:I call troll

[CargoCultCoder]

Do you really believe that average persons actually read press releases, much less know anything about FireFox or download statistics?

Given that a high percentage of "news" stories are simply regurgitated press releases: Yeah, I believe a fair number of "average persons" (WTF that means) have heard of Firefox, and that without too much help would readily translate "100 million downloads" to "100 million users". How many "average persons" readily equate "hits" to "page views"? You and I know they aren't the same thing, but folks who don't spend hours a day with their hands on this stuff may not even suspect there's a difference.

Poor MS bigots, can't take a little of your own medicine eh?

Huh?

Re:I call troll

[jaseparlo]

Alternately though, I have downloaded it once, and distributed that download to each of the 300 machines in the school I work at. Many other schools and quite a few corporates have rolled it out similarly. So while the number is out cos one person might download it 30 times, it's also out because you can't measure how many times a single download has been installed. Unless I guess you make it generate a unique key when it's installed and phone home with that every time you run Firefox, or something equally over the top.

Which still wouldn't work, cos firewalls and proxies would munch that

I agree it's an almost meaningless statistic, but then saying 1 billion computers in the world have IE installed is equally meaningless, since there's no way for the average user to avoid that

Re:I call troll

[realityfighter]

For the love of Bob...

Look, Firefox does NOT have the capability to determine how many "real" Firefox users there are. Period. Those numbers are impossible to get. Just like it's impossible to know how many people watched a specific television program on a specific night, how many dentists recommend Crest or how many Americans approve of the President. It's just not possible. The technology to make that knowledge possible is NOT something that you want installed in your home. Trust me.

Firefox download numbers are NOT a bad way to count individual users. They're a much better way, statistically, than the method used to determine the Presidents approval rating or the Nielsen numbers. (They take a small sample and scale it up to get a picture of the entire population.) If Firefox were a commercial product, we would use sales figures, but it isn't being offered for sale. So we count every download as a "sale." If you have a better method for counting users, please, please enlighten us. Otherwise you're equating use of the best data available to outright lying, and that's just not cool.

God...would you call someone a liar if he used "car" instead of "1997 Honda Civic"? Get a grip.

Re:I call troll

[Elixon]

Speaking about XY numbers of downloads... but did somebody mention how much users feel satisfied after one month of usage?

There is 300 million of people that have a flu out there (+- few millions ;-), we can easily create ads like this: "Flu community grown to 300 millions flu users!". But does it say something valuable except that the "product" is "catchy"? Does this information reveals the loyalty, satisfaction, excitement of the users or quality of the product? No.

I believe that browsers should not be just about the style or other kind of hype (well, they partially are, but it is simply caused by small number of competing products and big names behind them that create huge bias).

Browsers are developed to be used on daily bases. If you use something on daily basis then the excitement can disappear very quickly and the only important thing that will remain is the feeling of satisfaction from the quality product or the pain... But this is the information that cannot be read from the number of downloads.

I personnaly feel very excited about Firefox. I use it as my primary browser. I feel satisfied on 65% and the rest is the pain because I must work with Firefox every day and I fight its weaknesses every day. (For example one serious unresolved bug that crashes Firefox prevents me from going with my own XUL CMS live - this is my biggest 6-month old pain, but you cannot obtain this information from my 3+ download points that I generated in the download statistics).

Re:I call troll

[Shark]

Then again, what's a user? If you have one download for one public PC used by 1000 people every week... How many users does that make? I'm not arguing how misleading or not the figures are, but I think those figures are used because those are the only figures they have. How they translate into real users is anybody's (educated or uneducated) guess.

Personally, I think they're merely optimistic about their numbers. We can e-mail always them and have them put a '*' next to the figure with small print at the bottom of the page explaining the nature of http transfers and what not if we really are unhappy.

I don't feel utterly cheated for spending *zero money* on *trying* their product because of figures some may call misleading. I don't really know who would feel that way either.

Re:I call troll

[FragHARD]

So how is this different from microsoft total always listing how many copies of windoze is cumulatively out there STILL running on computers from the 90's???

<<And then the question becomes... Is McDonald's more immature for advertising how many billions they've served (obviously meaning burgers, not people), or for having a clown for a spokesman?>>

Re:I call troll

[Zeinfeld]

Beg your pardon? How is the DVD competition to the movie makers? Or are the Oscars presented by the cinema owners all of a sudden?

Well not to rehash the blog post, the Oscars are presented by the academy which pretty much shills for the middlemen in the process. So even though DVD is not likely to spell the end of big budget movies, the acting profession or obscenely highly paid actors they are not good news for the distributors.

Re:I call troll

[instarx]

McDonalds has for years advertised they have served "millions" and later "billions" of people. Interestingly, they never spent the time to figure out that some of those billions served were sometimes the same people going back for more

God, it was millions and then billions of burgers served to people, not billions of people served burgers. Sometimes I really have to wonder about people on slashdot.

Re:I call troll

[cdeobald]

The figures can be misleading in more than one way. They don't take into account, for example, that I download only once to install it on at least 150 machines in my organization. It cuts many ways. What ever the figures truly mean, they translate into a lot of traffic and interest (and some updates and patches).

Re:I call troll

[p-cubed]

Isn't McDonalds referring to the number of burgers served, rather than the number of people served? Presumably, they have accurate statistics on this.

Re:I call troll

[rtb61]

No it's marketing, the worst kind of troll. Trying to draw people to the not so cooltechzone web site to generate marketing revenue, by writing an inflamatory story and putting it up on slashdot.

Re:I call troll

[Anonymous Coward]

Counting downloads as users is an established industry practice - just have a look at press releases issued by Microsoft or any other big ISV who offer some piece of software as a free download (a toolbar, a plug-in or whatever). We can argue on how misleading is the equation #downloads==#users, but to single out the "immaturity" of the Firefox community for this behavior (as opposed to the industry as a whole) smells mala fide to me.

-- Steed

Re:I call troll

[mgblst]

Wow, you head must explode everytime you read a newspaper, or watch commercial television.

Of course, you are being very hypothetical. To call this sort of advertising evil is stupid, and that is exactly what you are equating it with.

Re:I call troll

[manojen]

"Track the number of users updating your product, instead of the number of users downloading your product. Whereas downloads will give you an - highly - inflated numbers of users, tracking update stats will give you a - underrated, but verfiable - better measure of how many people are actually actively using it." The standard practice in most organizations here in India is that once you install the OS and a basic software like the browser which works then don't disturb te system with updates etc., especially if you are suing linux/unix, until the next OS update. Therefore a hundred of updates might be issued but no one here bothers with them as long as the original is working, and hence no. of updates will definiteily not act as a guide of the no. of users. If you are bothered about security then rest assured mostly all computers work behind the institutional firewalls etc., so security is not an issue for the individual users, it's the headache of system admin.

Re:I call troll

[Anonymous Coward]

Do you really think that isn't misleading? That it doesn't make the average person think that there are 100 million users?

Only the people who think that downloading software is the only way to get it, and that once you got it there is no way to get rid of it. You know, the people who never bought a single piece of software on a CD, and built their computer themselves (the only way to get it without buying a preinstalled OS). But but but, around here we call them "geeks", and they definitely know that a downloaded file can be copied.

Re:I call troll

[marcello_dl]

what on earth is the point of making a big fuss over them, if not to mislead people?

Implying malevolence is a bit of a stretch IMO: when one puts something online the first number you have is the number of downloads from your page. All the rest, market penetration, user satisfaction, installed base, total number of downloads from all the other sources, are in fact estimates.
So I see no reason why FF crew shouldn't feel great for it. If I had a piece of OSS that popular, I'd probably do the same.
Of course I know next to nothing about who's behind Firefox, I tend to like 'em though... just judging the tree from the fruit.

Re:I call troll

[Monimonika]

I agree with you Pneuma. Over at Mozillazine, the standard reply to anyone who posts saying/threatening that (s)he'll switch back to IE (or go to Opera) is "Goodbye :) Nice to have known ya."

Re:I call troll

[bunratty]

I agree that the download figures are meaningless.

My take on download figures is that they provide a very rough estimate of the number of users who have tried a product. In this case, Firefox has been tried by roughly 150 million users. Perhaps the number is as high as 200 million, perhaps as low as 100 million, but it seems unlikely that it's been tried by as many as 400 million or as few as 50 million.

When you add that there are about 1 billion Internet users and Firefox has about 10% usage share, there seem to be roughly 100 million current Firefox users. Then we can say that it seems likely that most users who have tried Firefox are still using it.

Instead of these numbers being meaningless, it seems like Firefox is one of the most downloaded programs ever, and most users who try it are satisfied with it. Perhaps only WinZip has had more downloads. It might be that Firefox is the most successful open source product ever. I don't see that it's misleading or immature to boast about these facts.

Re:I call troll

[ArsenneLupin]

I'm in a mood of splitting hair today!

(obviously meaning burgers, not people)

Not the same thing either.

Somebody very hungry could order to burgers at once (... and still be counted as only one non-unique person server).

Or, on the contrary, somebody very weight-conscious could just take a salad, and no burgers at all (... and still be counted).

Only when coming back at a different time will that person be counted twice (...incidentally, also if he only has a salad the first time round, and a serving of french fries the second time).

And no, "meals served" wouldn't cut it either, as somebody might just take a soda.

Re:I call troll

[KarateExplosions]

Actually, if you're really in a hair splitting mood today, the "X billion served" number actually refers to hamburger patties, not to burgers and not to people, and was not a terribly scientific number to begin with.

But if you order a hamburger, you count as one. If you order two hamburgers, you count as two. If you order 3 hamburgers, 8 Big Macs (2 all-beef patties each), and 2 triple-cheeseburgers, you will count as 25 served (right before your coronary), even though you're only 1 person ordering 13 sandwiches.

On the other hand, if a busload of 25 people run into McDonalds and each one of them gets a large fry, a medium chocolate shake, two apple pies, an order of ten Chicken McNuggets, a Filet-o-Fish sandwich, and of course a salad and Diet Coke to wash it all down, they will each count as zero served.

In any event, in the mid-90s I think McDonalds stopped counting and most of their signs just say something like, "Billions served".

Consider your hair split.

Re:I call troll

[Eivind]

Why ?

I was just stating that "Millions of new users every week" is, plain and simple, a lie.

You expect advertising to be lying -- or if you don't, you end up making a lot of very very stupid decisions mostly in the category that separates you from your money while giving you nothing worthwhile in return.

But expecting something, and finding the same thing OK, accpetable, fine is two different things.

Re:I call troll

[Eivind]

You're out of your mind. There's nothing wrong with stating the truth. Also nothing wrong with guestimating if you have no better info. Also nothing wrong with using download-numbers to guesstimate users. Yes, the estimates will be very very rough, but as you correctly point out, there's no better alternative really.

What's so fucking wrong with writing: "Over 100 million downloads", "2 million downloads a week" ?

Why do you feel the need to convert that to, not only users, but *NEW* users ? What's the point ? You know you can't do it without likely missing your mark by a large factor, in one or the other direction, so why ?

Firefox is a good product. It should be more than possible to market it using a less braindead argument than: All the others are using it, so you should too.

Re:I call troll

[bigpicture]

The only piece of the original article that I agree with is they shouldn't resort to the MS tactics of slamming the competition. That's for politicians. But I have not seen an instance of the Fire Fox community do this, so is that just conjecture?

Re:I call troll

[Anonymous Coward]

Breaking news: local news misleading, report at 11:15

Re:I call troll

[Fordiman]

Install it on my computer. Install it on my parents computer. Install it on my work computer. Fuck up my cpu and install it on my CPU again. New version, rinse and repeat. Download to expeirment with BartPE (Yay! I have live windows with a browser!). Download to experiment with UPX and repackage (I like my 'lite' version. 8M install.). Download it and fail to build Firefox-Qt from scratch. Download it and build the KMozilla part from scratch. Download and build Minimo for my PPC. New version; rinse and repeat.

Yeah. There are good reasons to download the same program a number of times, especially if the program gets new features.

In fact, that reminds me; I need to see how far along the Qt version has come. I'm really looking forward to the tighter integration with KDE.

Re:I call troll

[Fnkmaster]

Secondly, that's a non-sequitur. Firefox's success is dependent upon convincing people that it is dominating? Since when?

No, it's called "demand side increasing returns" or "network externalities". This effect and the strategies that lead to success in markets that exhibit it are part of any basic strategy class in business school.

Web browsers and operating systems exhibit network externalities (the more people using a product, the more value using that product has). In any such market, long term success depends on capturing market share, and once you've already got the early adopters, getting at the mainstream market often requires convincing them that everybody else is adopting a product.

This is not the website you are looking for

[Anonymous Coward]

i meant to type in slashdot.org but i seem to of arrived at someones myspace blog, anyone have any instructions for finding slashdot.org please

Re:This is not the website you are looking for

[swerk]

Here here.

This article makes broad, knee-jerk statements about a wide and diverse community based on a few scattered facts and ideas. Which I'm sure is different than the statistics-skewing and fanboyism being ranted about. Somehow.

Re:This is not the website you are looking for

[tanguyr]

Here here.

Where? Where?

http://www.straightdope.com/mailbag/mhear.html/

resort to using third-class promotional tactics?

[lordkuri]

YES! In case you haven't noticed, advertising in this day and age is mostly pandering to the lowest common denominator. The vast majority of people *love* to see "big numbers" because "well, if everyone else is doing it, I should do it too". Microsoft themselves have used the exact same tactics, as well as almost every other company on the planet at some point or another.

Advertising is a game that has to be played, and it must be played in a fashion to make it work. Personally, I think it's somewhat sad that they have to resort to outlandish claims, but that's what works... it speaks more for the state of our society than anything else.

This story is pointless

[Manuscript Replica]

Wow, fanboys of a technology of some kind are using misleading figures and unnecessarily degrading their competition? No way. That never happens.

Re:Cooooool.....

[Anonymous Coward]

Next time you might want to check that "Post Anonymously" box. See, it's not that hard.

Ye Olde Soap Box

[TechJones]

The answer is YES! Who doen't want to proclaim at the top of their lungs that MS does not have the only browser.

Re:Ye Olde Soap Box

[Anonymous Coward]

The answer is YES! Who doen't want to proclaim at the top of their lungs that MS does not have the only browser.

The majority of people I support at work think Internet Explorer and Yahoo are the same kind of thing. They have no clue on what the difference is between a browser and portal.

SUPPORT CALL: The internet keeps crashing.
ME: Are you using Internet Explorer?
SUPPORT CALL: No, I use Yahoo.

That clause doesn't parse

[AEton]

but does the community need to resort to using third-class promotional tactics with total downloads number?

If I could figure out what that meant I might have a witty retort.

Re:That clause doesn't parse

[ickypick]

"but does the community need to resort to using third-class promotional tactics with total downloads number?"

Didn't McDonalds use to post on their restraunts how many burgers they sold? Yeah, that's third rate alright. Just look how poorly that third rate chain has done! =)

Re:That clause doesn't parse

[slughead]

Didn't McDonalds use to post on their restraunts how many burgers they sold? Yeah, that's third rate alright. Just look how poorly that third rate chain has done! =)

McDonalds now says "billions and billions" sold instead of exact figures. I take that to mean that they're hiding their OBVIOUSLY declining sales figures in an effort to mislead stockholders.

Damned if you do, damned if you don't.

Re:That clause doesn't parse

[LordOfTheNoobs]

I'm surprised Starbucks doesn't do this, only in reference to the number of franchises it has sold.

Re:That clause doesn't parse

[subreality]

/* I hate it when people don't properly comment their English.  Perhaps this will help.
* Note: my marking of "with total download numbers" is debatable; it may go
* better as a preposition to "tactics" rather than "under", but there
* is a case either way.
*/

(does)[v] (the community)[d, n; subject] (need)[v] /* note two part verb, 'does need' */
{
    (to resort) [prep, v]
    {
        (to using) [prep, v]
        {
            (third-class promotional tactics) [adj, adj, n; object of using]
            (with total downloads number) [prep, adj, adj, n; object of using] /* missing 'the' */
        } /* 'to using' */
    } /* to resort */
} /* end of main sentence object */

Let the software speak for itself

[fak3r]

I always thought the NYTimes Ad thing was a bit silly, I mean come on, this is software; it should lead by example and be used by people in the know. People learn about new software from reviews and co-workers/friends. Mozilla is not Microsoft, they shouldn't spend money in an attempt to gain marketshare. This is not a case for old school marketing, this is a new way of thinking; let the software speak for itself.

Re:Let the software speak for itself

[Anonymous Coward]

Didn't Redhat says something similar? Come on, cite your sources AIP-style [1].

Re:Let the software speak for itself

[kiwimate]

Mozilla is not Microsoft, they shouldn't spend money in an attempt to gain marketshare.

Why not?

This is not a case for old school marketing, this is a new way of thinking; let the software speak for itself.

If no-one's ever heard of it, it can speak for itself with an eloquence befitting Tolstoy, and it'll still sink into oblivion.

Re:Let the software speak for itself

[Anonymous Coward]

Well said dude! Let Firefox stand on it's technical merit, and reclaim it's place right next to... the Betamax VCR.

NOT!

Re:Let the software speak for itself

[bogie]

"Mozilla is not Microsoft, they shouldn't spend money in an attempt to gain marketshare. "

Why not?

Why because Firefox is OSS does it have to "let the software speak for itself"? Non-Profits need good PR too you know.

Your new way of thinking only gets you so far. I agree that they shouldn't be spending money foolishly but they also shouldn't run away from traditional Media tactics just to be different. Hype is gets users, quality is what keeps them.

Re:Let the software speak for itself

[pryonic]

"People learn about new software from reviews and co-workers/friends"

This is true for us in the IT community who have geeky friends and read magazines with technology reviews, but the majority of us techies have tried Firefox and decided we like it and told our friends, or have decided we don't like it and use something else.

I see no problem with advertising to reach a new audience who may otherwise not be exposed to a potential alternative that may bring them some benefits. They gained their main market share through word of mouth, this was the obvious next stage.

Re:Let the software speak for itself

[HuckleCom]

Why is the NYT Ad silly?

Advertising to the largest city in the U.S. - Versus a television commercial where you have to be there at the right time at the right channel - the newspaper also has national subscribers as well - I think it's a brilliant approach for an initial marketing maneuver.

Re:Let the software speak for itself

[Anonymous Coward]

"Microsoft has never won a war in development against anyone. But it proved to be master of marketing. Don't repeat the history. Don't downplay the marketing."

Re:Let the software speak for itself

[AviLazar]

it should lead by example and be used by people in the know.

Why should people who are not "in the know" be restricted from using this? The advertisement was not meant for the people who are "in the know" -- althought it is a feel good, the advertisement was meant to get the people who are out of the loop. Those are the people we want to leave MS - the people who are more vulnerable to malware. I have yet, in my entire computing life, ever gotten a virus and up until last year (maybe two years ago) I have pretty much always used IE (at least since after Netscape 4.7). Prior to learning about FireFox i was not "in the know"...thank god I am now.

Re:Let the software speak for itself

[hhr]

Advertising works. It works very well.

Yes, web gurus and geeks can lead by example, but all that means is that FireFox is for geeks and web gurus. It will not bring FireFox to the rest of us.

When you run an add it sends two messages. It tells those not in the know that FireFox exists. It also says "FireFox has such a broad appeal that we are willing to spend thousands of dollars to get the word out." That is an important message needed to grow the FireFox market.

Re:Let the software speak for itself

[Anonymous Coward]

I always thought the NYTimes Ad thing was a bit silly, I mean come on, this is software; it should lead by example and be used by people in the know. People learn about new software from reviews and co-workers/friends. Mozilla is not Microsoft, they shouldn't spend money in an attempt to gain marketshare. This is not a case for old school marketing, this is a new way of thinking; let the software speak for itself.

Considering Firefox is free, I'd consider it money well spent for a public service announcement akin to the recall notices that are required to be published for normal products that are defective... Software has no such quality standards unfortunately.

It's hard for free software to speak for itself when 90% of computers come with IE pointed at msn.com. It's highly unlikely that Firefox will be visible to most people without some advertising.

Re:Let the software speak for itself

[Coppit]

I'm sure that's what IBM said of OS/2, Lotus said about Ami Pro, and Netscape said about their browser. That approach only works when the playing field is fair.

There is no bad publicity.

[Chas]

Just like this guy and his snarky opinions are now getting his site lots of traffic.

Re:There is no bad publicity.

[Anonymous Coward]

This site was also linked to in an earlier story about OS X security today. I think someone saw this story linked to the OS X one and just submitted it.

Re:There is no bad publicity.

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't worry, he will meet justice. MUAHAHAHAHAH

--
The League of Shadows

Re:There is no bad publicity.

[KingNaught]

What traffic, you think any /. readers acctually reads the articles. Slashdot readers are a lot like playboy readers, the only time someone visits the link is when there are pretty pictures to look at.

This is news...

[Shanep]

how?

Re:This is news...

[Anonymous Coward]

What crack addicted moderator marked that as Offtopic? This "news" is non-news. It's a silly big girls blouse, hissy fit rant. Nothing more. Some guys getting upset because some people think 180 million downloads is significant and putting too much emphasis on that? How on Earth is THAT news? It's like listening to some 5 year old in the supermarket, crying and begging, crawling around on the floor with a teary red face because their mother won't buy them a Kinder Surprise. Except, it's an adult and this boring crap is a slashdot front pager.

Grow the fuck up.

Third Class Promotional Tactics??

[Foofoobar]

does the community need to resort to using third-class promotional tactics with total downloads number?

*points at Microsoft*
They started it FIRST!!

Would you prefer Firefox and Mozilla to pay for researchers to put out highly slanted reports instead? Which class would that be? First? Second? If you ask me, that's without class.

Re:Third Class Promotional Tactics??

[Anonymous Coward]

Yea right..? Atleast you can come up with a better excuse...

Re:Third Class Promotional Tactics??

[Anonymous Coward]

How about those Microsoft TV ads where they see security and trust where it obviously doesn't exist?

... assuming 9 out of 10 downoads are uninstalled.

[guyfromindia]

The author seems to have a good argument...
But, even if 1/10th of 150 Million downloads are by individuals - who continue to use Firefox after downloading - 15,000,000 is still a significant number, given that most OEMs are still putting IE as the default browser in new PCs...
If all OEMs include Firefox in their new PCs and ask the user to configure which browser they would like to use (on first startup), I am sure most of them who know about Firefox will choose it..
That said, I would say that promoting Firefox by saying that "Firefox Downloads Exceed 150 Million" is still valid... at least it is for the betterment of the whole Internet ;)

My browser can beat up your browser!

[ENOENT]

Oh yeah, well, you're ugly!

Re:My browser can beat up your browser!

[jftitan]

oh yeah, well Plastic Surgery Bitch! I'll be slimmer, and my face in buttox will make me beautiful. (I know I have no clue as to how to spell butox injections)

ah screw it, I'd rather be ugly than broke.

Re:My browser can beat up your browser!

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm amazed that in two attempts, you didn't even manage to get the first vowel in Botox right. Or even manage to capitalize the first letter

Re:My browser can beat up your browser!

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeesh. Everybody knows it's spelled "your."

Re:My browser can beat up your browser!

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe he felt that capitalizing the word "Bitch" covered all your base. :)

Standards Conformance

[gowen]

While on the subject of standards, why did TFA not reach the standard of "competent"? And why don't slashdot editors seem to have any quality standards whatsoever?
Truly a terrible, content free, vacuous, badly-written article.

Can I have those two minutes of my life back please?

Right..

[PeterSomnium]

The thing with these numbers is that they are misleading at best, and the only thing they accomplish is immature fanboyism. It's a fact that Internet Explorer is inferior to Firefox with its extensive collection of extensions and ability to support qualified web standards, but does the community need to resort to using third-class promotional tactics with total downloads number?"

Right, so 'fanboyism' is wrong, but you're trying to flame anyway? I think that the author is something like an overzealous ignorant flamer FF-fanboy

Don't get me wrong btw, I love FF, but people like this make me sick.

how is this different?

[gEvil (beta)]

How is this any different from Microsoft claiming to have X billion MSN searches a month when their browser redirects any typo or bad url as an MSN search query? I agree that the reporting of X million downloads isn't particularly meaningful, but when the competition sits there throwing around meaningless numbers, one of the only choices is to join in and play the same game...

Re:how is this different?

[DaHat]

So... the justification for doing it is that the other, evil side did it first?

I thought people gave up on the "but he hit me first" logic back in third grade... I guess I was wrong.

What ever happened to rising above the competition, rather than stooping to their level?

Re:how is this different?

[Phroggy]

...but when the competition sits there throwing around meaningless numbers, one of the only choices is to join in and play the same game...

One of the other choices is to not join in and play the same game.

Re:how is this different?

[Anonymous Coward]

I thought people gave up on the "but he hit me first" logic back in third grade... I guess I was wrong.

You clearly haven't been paying attention to politics in the Middle East.

Who cares?

[schnikies79]

I get so tired of hearing about the browser war. It's just that, a browser, not the be-all, end-all of human existance. Use what you like and be done with it, because fanboyism sucks...

We all Know...

[xoip]

Downloads are just a rough approximation of support.
The fact that some users may Download multiple times while others will re-use the same copy over and over or bundle it on a CD for distribution.
That said, there is nothing wrong with letting people know that Firefox is a viable alternative to IE, and using the download number is the only tool at hand to guage the size of the user community.

Re:We all Know...

[Bogtha]

Downloads are just a rough approximation of support.

Yes, but there's no way of knowing how accurate this "rough approximation" is. It sounds like you think that an unknown number of people being undercounted and an unknown number of people being overcounted somehow cancel each other out. They don't. Making up a number on the spot is a "rough approximation" too. Rough approximations are meaningless unless you know how far off you could be.

using the download number is the only tool at hand to guage the size of the user community.

Believe it or not, surveys have been conducted for centuries without the aid of HTTP logs. Even if it was the only tool at hand, it doesn't make the numbers any more reliable. If you didn't have the HTTP logs, would you consider guessing to be suitable because it's "the only tool at hand"?

Computer Science

[prgrmr]

There was a time when working with computers was referred to as a Science. This was completely justifiable in that almost every aspect of working with computers can be quantified. And as Heinlein observed, that which can be quantified is science, and that which cannot is opinion.

While the article's author does, in fact, have a point about the statistical validity of the Firefox download count, he doesn't approach the subject from that perspective, and instead is ultimately guilty of the same thing he is accusing the Firefox community of: being completely immature.

Re:Computer Science

[Anonymous Coward]

CS is not a "science". for the same reason math is not a "science". a field is a science if it is advanced using the scientific method, which is hypothesis, experiement, theorem. when was the last time you saw a math prof hold an experiment to confirm 2+2=4??? personally i like to experiment with quicksort just to confirm that it is truly sorting.

Re:Computer Science

[Anonymous Coward]

And as Heinlein observed, that which can be quantified is science, and that which cannot is opinion.

That's Heinlein's opinion.

And that article was called a "column"

[unborracho]

What a sad excuse for an article on Slashdot. The column is not well written at all and points out facts that should be blatantly obvious to anyone that has ever downloaded FireFox before. 150 Million Downloads != 150 Million FireFox users, just like 1 Million World of Warcraft subscribers != 1 Million players online at once.

Can slashdot editors please refrain from posting "columns" which should really just be blogs that we can ignore?

the answer is clearly "YES"

[xxxJonBoyxxx]

"It's a fact that Internet Explorer is inferior to Firefox..."

I'll only believe that IE is inferior to Firefox for end user applications if lots and lots of end users agree.

"...does the community need to resort to using third-class promotional tactics with total downloads number?"

Well, if 150 million end users agree IE is inferior to Firefox for end user applications, then I would tend to agree with them, especially given the extra download Firefox users must perform to install Firefox on their desktop.

So...the answer would appear to be "Yes, Firefox is doing the correct thing by posting usage and adoption numbers." Can I help you with anything else today?

Troll!

[GarfBond]

The counter ignores you if you are using a firefox UA.
It also doesn't include downloads from mirrors or updates pushed out through the browser updater.

If anything, this means that the counter is underreporting. Also that this article is mostly nullified.

Also, isn't this the 2nd link to cooltechzone in as many articles? I think someone's trolling for hits.

Re:Troll!

[DogDude]

And of course, there are people like me who downloaded it about 10 times at work, but ended up not using any of the copies because the lack of ActiveX makes it pretty much useless for us. The 150M downloaded means just that... it was downloaded 150 million times. There's NO POSSIBLE WAY to get even close to estimating the number of users with that statistic. So there. You're both trolls.

Re:Troll!

[Hast]

The good news for you is that there are extentions which allow you to open IE in a Firefox tab. Good for those pesky intarweb pages that just refuses to work.

In fact, I'm quite sure that there are extentions which makes it possible to use ActiveX in FF as well. Personally I just use FF for my "real stuff" and keep IE around for other pages.

latest news from Mozilla Organisation

[Anonymous Coward]

"Slashdot reports: Firefox downloads 'sickly' out of control!"

Cool Tech Zone

[wackysootroom]

Come on. "Cool Tech Zone"? Are we really that hard up for news that we have to go dipping into the bottom of the garbage pail of tech websites to find a troll to post on the front of slashdot. All I can say is at least it's not a blog.

150 million hamburgers sold!

[MrSoundAndVision]

150 million is a lot of hamburgers. But what's more is that I don't think that number includes on the copies of Firefox that are copied over to Linux distro's and distributed that way. Maybe I'm wrong, and I have no idea how many more copies of Firefox that would mean are floating around. Just a thought.

Extensions?

[Anonymous Coward]

I always thought the "extensive collection of extensions" was Firefox's biggest flaw. You have to find the right collection of ill-fitting extensions to get the basic functionality you want.

-1, Troll

[Russ Nelson]

So, Taco-breath, when are we going to be able to moderate articles? Because surely this one deserves to be rated -1, Troll.

Re:-1, Troll

[Russ Nelson]

You jerk! You moderated my off-topic posting as Flamebait! How could you?!? It was offtopic! See it in the menu there?!? Offtopic, not Flamebait! Get it right next time, sheesh! Now I'm going to wear out the exclamation mark on my keyboard because of you!

I probably screw up the average too

[grahamsz]

I run firefox on 1 windows machine, 1 mac, and 1 linux box (and i used to do solaris too).

I've probably downloaded firefox 4 or 5 times on each of those platforms, yet I only have three active installs.

Re:I probably screw up the average too

[ADRA]

Inversely, I used to sysadmin a network where I installed Firefox onto a few dozen PC's but from only one download.

The numbers are obviously unreliable, but they do lead to trends. Maybe a 'better' number would be a % delta over month-month or quarter-quarter. Then again, you're assuming that people would understand what that means. Pure raw numbers at least cater to the lowest common denominator in that the vast majority of people know that 150M is a lot.

Re:I probably screw up the average too

[im_thatoneguy]

I'm not entirely sure why people would want to advertise how many times Firefox has been downloaded. The obvious next step would be to compare your statistic to the competition. Something tells me that Firefox, while downloaded in large quantities, won't even come close to touching IE in the downloads/updates department.

If anything the current campaign tells me as a consumer: "Firefox, it's downloaded quite a bit." Not exactly a strong marketing slogan. The alternative Microsoft slogan would be "IE, downloaded by just about everybody."

Ordinary users don't know what web standards are

[NekoXP]

Of course they need to resort to "immature" tactics like reporting download totals and making fun of IE.

Any non-geek user doesn't understand what is wrong with IE. You can't verbally demonstrate what is wrong with it. HTML standards compliance, full CSS2 support, Javascript, DOM1, wah wah wa. It goes over their heads.

You could show them the difference but CNN and MSN and Slashdot and so on all work in IE just fine, with no huge glitches or problems, no great security issues (I tend not to click things at random).

What I find more immature is site designers who make sites which ONLY work in Gecko (and not Opera and specially not IE!) and then complain that the other browsers are not standards compliant. These site designers were the first to blast websites that were "best viewed in IE" or designed using Microsoft JS extensions (document.all[]) and so on.

Not so much the development team or Mozilla marketing fanboys but basically a pretentious, self-righteous, deluded few.

Poor argument.

[kryptx]

I don't like the Firefox community either; I think they give their browser too much credit. But this "article" is just a waste of time.

See this page for a more thorough list of inaccuracies that are continually perpetuated by the Firefox community.

Since When...

[eno2001]

...is reporting stats immature or "fanboy" behavior. There are plenty of sites that report stats ad nauseum for things that other people care little about. Would you call those sorts of sites immature or "fanboy" sites? I personally think the submitter has an axe to grind... Too bad you can't mod the people who get their articles submitted when it's something as stupid as the main story here.

Re:Since When...

[Dhalka226]

There are plenty of sites that report stats ad nauseum for things that other people care little about.

Some stats are good, some are stupid. I hardly thinking earnings reports from a company that I might consider investing in to be a stupid stat.

The Netcraft stats? They're one step away from "stupid" in the "not useful" department, because as you can see from comments made even here every time Netcraft has some new numbers, there are problems with the methodology (what sites are you collecting from? how diverse is the readship? etc) that makes them of questionable value.

Holding download counts up as a sign of quality is even worse. It's just stupid. I can download a program, find out that it sucks and never use it again. Happens to me all the time. And further, 150 million downloads--swell, fine. So how many users is that? I have downloaded the newest Firefox three times (one for my linux partition, one for Windows, and once for my laptop) and I am just a single-user, not an administrator for a company or school or any such. That also does not include downloads of any previous version. So the number may be artificially inflated.

At my school, Firefox is installed on every lab machine--which just in the ITK labs, is probably close to 200 machines. It is very likely that they downloaded it exactly once, ghost'd the drive of a machine when they had it set up how they wanted and installed the rest of the machines that way. So the number may be artificially deflated.

So in other words we have a number that may be too high, may be too low, and basically says nothing but how many times somebody clicked on a download link. That's pretty useless--but where it steps into fanyboyism is when people try to use that number to mean anything other than that, such as an indication of quality.

Re:Since When...

[eno2001]

Ahhh.. but grasshoppah... you make the mistake of thinking that the download count equates to quality in anyone's mind other than your own. It merely indicates popularity. And popularity doesn't mean anything other than, "we're doing a good job promoting our product with few resources compared to MS's unfair advantage of bundling IE with the OS". Anyone who takes it to mean more than that is, well... being a fool.

Re:Affectionate?

[Anonymous Coward]

affectionate Pronunciation (-fksh-nt)
adj.
1. Having or showing fond feelings or affection; loving and tender.
2. Obsolete Inclined or disposed.

Courtesy of dictionary.com

Let the software speak for itself-Talkback

[Anonymous Coward]

"This is not a case for old school marketing, this is a new way of thinking; let the software speak for itself."

Hi! I'm Firefox. You may have heard of me on such websites as slashdot.

*shakes box*

Stop that! Now go tell all your friends that I'm much better than that silly Internet Explorer.

*shakes box*

What did I tell you about that? Please download and use Firefox. Lot's of downloaders can't be wrong.

Problem with many free software projects...

[quag7]

I've kind of felt that this sort of thing was a problem with several high-profile free software projects. Notably, this kind of thing usually comes from the user community; you don't ordinarily see developers spending time with this.

It's too bad, too. There are a lot of great reasons to use free alternatives to commercial software. I'd like to see more positive advocacy and less bashing the competition. And not because the competition doesn't deserve to be bashed (sometimes it does), but because I think you make a better case this way. This generates positive buzz.

It would be interesting, for example, to add up the number of "You are a fanboy." and related sarcastic posts on Slashdot alone.

Some of these may be trolls, but I'm sure many people are just sick of hearing that, for example, Firefox, will cure cancer.

I use free software (almost exclusively). I'm a big fan of it. I just think there are better ways to sell a product to a general audience.

Re:Problem with many free software projects...

[ratboy666]

If you think there are better ways, lets have some suggestions.

If you don't have any suggestions (or, are you saying "I am not smart enough"), you're trolling. I hope not.

Ratboy

Re:Problem with many free software projects...

[quag7]

Principally I'm talking about selling free software by its merits. It's one thing to say, "X sucks, this is better." It's another to have a comparative list of features. That's a fair way of showing the differences.

Another way to promote it is to show point by point comparisons on a need assessment.

For example, "We need X, Y, and Z" in a web server.

Show how, say, Apache meets these needs, how a competing product meets these needs, and then show the bottom line cost-wise.

This latter example was actually how we introduced Apache into my project at work. There was a lot of concern about Apache because my company generally used commercial software (including web servers). Most of the people who were to make the final decision weren't particularly interested in having tried-and-true commercial solutions bashed - whatever problems commercial products had, they had worked fairly well for several years.

What did win them over was the fact that Apache could match the commercial product, and do it for free. They were moved by positive studies and positive feedback from others who had used it both within my organization and outside. The success of Apache has led to its deployment in other places now.

Time and time again, I have noticed that merely bashing the competition is unpersuasive to the unconverted. It comes off as bizarre, cult-like, or nerdy in a way that, in my own experience, turns people off. Negativity is easy. It's not what the competition can't do but what free software *can* do.

Lastly, the emotional bashing of commercial software and companies has gotten fairly old. Everyone knows (and sarcastically parodies) platform fanatics. You'll see sarcastic quips in any thread regarding, "X fanboy" with some kind of parody of their general rap:

"LOL M1CR0$L0TH W1ND0ZE!"

Minds shut because of the generalized disgust with the individual making the case, as opposed to the merits of the case itself. People generally respond to educated, positive remarks, in almost every situation where persuasion is the focus. Those already convinced or partisan on a certain issue may enjoy negativity but I don't think those who aren't convinced do.

This is why people who are politically partisan enjoy negative campaigning and sensationalistic sound-byte swipes at the opposition, but the unaligned are generally turned off by this. And when it comes to software advocacy, we are talking about the unaligned - those who don't really have a position yet. If an individual already hates Internet Explorer, great - a positive campaign to promote Firefox gives them an alternative. But if a person doesn't have any major problems with IE, or doesn't know any better, a slagging campaign is just going to come off as what people always term "zealotry." This is likely to prejudice them against alternatives on the basis of the messenger. Such ranting comes off as all heat, no light.

I've seen this happen before on Usenet and other places.

Create excitement. Create a little hype, even. That's the best way to keep minds open and get people to listen without them being distracted (or disgusted) by the disposition, personality, or motives of the advocate.

Positivity is more motivating in general, in almost all things. Negativity more often than not goes to "preaching to the converted."

Re:Problem with many free software projects...

[ratboy666]

I always have difficulty in understanding this. Why a "merit based sales job" for something that is free?

If the "customer" can simply try it, and see if it meets her needs...

It is genuinely hard to come up with competitive feature assessments. You have to be intimately aware of the products and how the features relate to each other.

Personally, I don't think its worth it. Given the price point, the "customer" can make the assessment and comparision themselves.

If a commercial software vendor starts targeting one of the free alternatives directly -- the question raised is why? Is that alternative good enough? It becomes advertising for the alternative. It would have been better for Microsoft had they continued ignoring Linux.

And if the alternative is ignored, popular use will drive the examination.

In other words, simply trumpeting "150 million downloads" is enough.

Ratboy.

Re:Affectionate?

[mariotwins]

affectionate (adj)- Having or showing fond feelings or affection; loving and tender

Affectionate is not a verb.

why should you report numbers?

[prof187]

simple: to let people who are considering supporting firefox know that it is worth their time. the only way people are going to move away from IE-only renderable sites is if it merits their time to ensure cross-compatibility. by letting them know how many people are downloading it, it helps show them that there is a install base worthy of attention

Jesus. Just Jesus.

[Anonymous Coward]

Mod parent down for thread bare worn out lame attempt at "sarcasm". Parent has nothing to add to discussion.

Re:Jesus. Just Jesus.

[BobPaul]

Mod parent down for thread bare worn out lame attempt at "sarcasm". Parent has nothing to add to discussion

I don't know... I found his comment humourous and dead accurate. He said the story was stupid, and it is. Seems on topic to me... Now you're comment on the other hand...

No real content here...

[Kaellenn]

There's no real content to this story; he basically spends 4-5 paragraphs calling the firefox community "immature" (speaking of relying on shaky tactics, can someone get this guy a thesaurus?)

The only legitimate point is:

What I recommend is that the Firefox community doesn't get carried away with the whole "open-source is eternal" argument and its supposed battle against capitalism.

I definitely believe that this argument applies to *any* open source project. Simply put, the Stallman's of the world are not going to be the ones to convince the general public of the joys of open source software. If the world were swayed by these tactics in general, we'd all spend our time watching the evangelical channels on television.

A fact????

[hawkmoon77]

You know how people use the word "literally" when they mean "figuratively?" Apparently, it is also now okay to use the word, "fact" to mean "opinion."

Re:A fact????

[typical]

Apparently, it is also now okay to use the word, "fact" to mean "opinion."

You omitted an "I think" in that sentence.

Re:Affectionate?

[spellraiser]

BZZT!

You are obviously not empowered to actualize your full reading comprehensive potential.

It's off to the indoctrinative camps with you!

My biggest beef

[John Napkintosh]

My biggest beef with the Firefox crowd (not the developers themselves) has always been that it seems very agenda-based. Not gaining market share, not being a good browser, but just being anti-something (IE?). If a product is good, it will speak for itself. I don't need every geek and useragent-detecting website out there to tell my that I should be using another browser. It comes off as VERY fanboyish, too. There are very few features in firefox that I actually look for, and, in fact, the ONLY reason I use it is because I can create bookmark groups. That's it.

If I decide I need a new browser, I will use a new browser. Until then, I will use as man browser as I want.

Worse than a troll.

[Anonymous Coward]

It's just blatantly hypocritical. If I may summarize the article:

"OMG, dudez! we all no dat frefox is TEH BOMBBBB!!!! and like IE is SUX0RS! (i mean HARD!) but wecan be k00l n not TOTALY thro it n thr bitchass facez!! NOT! LOLOLOLOL!!! serously u guyz lez be chillllll cuz we gosta reprezet teh awsums1!! ANDALL U IE BIACHES KAN SUK MY DIK!!"

Yup. That's a pretty accurate paraphrase.

Re:Affectionate?

[spellraiser]

affectionate (adj)- Having or showing fond feelings or affection; loving and tender

Affectionate is not a verb.

Tell that to the author of TFA:

I agree that Firefox has literally changed the way we browse the Internet, but that doesn't mean that we have to affectionate the browser uncontrollably and recklessly.

Download numbers

[unixluv]

How is that any different than McDonalds 175 billion served?

IE is Inferior??

[TastyWheat]

Oh come on. The problem with this article isn't that it criticizes the Fire Fox community for crappy advertising but that it describes IE as inferior to Fire Fox as a Fait Accompli. Now that is immature.

Re:IE is Inferior??

[Anonymous Coward]

So others don't have to google the definition too...

Fait Accompli: French, meaning "accomplished fact". Something which has already occurred, making any debate or decision about it useless.

Building Community

[bgfay]

There is something to be said for building community and counting downloads tends to get people going. It seems to have worked pretty well at iTunes and I for one wouldn't mind seeing an active counter over at the Firefox main site.

Whatever the case, this whole article sounds more than a little trollish.

It's a cooltechzone story, so what do you expect?

[Anonymous Coward]

After all cooltechzone was the side that informed us that linux hacker spend 90% of their time writing viruses for linux.

They also gave us the great insight that Linux users were shocked that revenues of Windows server sales surparesed those of Unix sales for the first time and that this showed that the end of Linux was nigh.
It turned out the expert at cooltechzone weren't aware that Linux is not Unix and that the relevant study didn't group the two together.
And they were unable to even read the study that also reported that Linux was still the fastest growing server OS.

So yes, another troll from cooltechzone. Yay!

Re:Numbers game

[Pneuma ROCKS]

What do you mean? I have the plugins for Shockwave on Firefox and they work just fine. You just go to any page that uses Shockwave and Firefox will prompt you to install the plugin.

Reporting total downloads makes sense

[Darth_Burrito]

Reporting total downloads may not give the reader the best possible representation of the actual popularity of Firefox with respect to its competition, but it still makes sense. When I look for freeware or open source software, and I'm comparing two products, one of the first things I look at is how popular the product is, and usually the best available metric is the number of times the product has been downloaded.

Is this number an accurate representation of the number of users of that product? No. Who even cares? It is a figure that tells you a little about how popular a piece of software is. It's a popular metric used for this purpose. And really, that's all that matters.

So, then

[Catbeller]

What else can Firefox use as a metric other than downloads? Corporate sales?

Trolly. Cute. At least it gets everyone's blood moving on a Monday morning.

Marketing-- okay. Crashing-- no!

[helix_r]

Best to leave marketing to the professionals. Geeks don't understand it and never will. If a full page ad in the NYTimes is what they need, then by all means, bless them.

However, the thing that will kill firefox more effectively than anything else is if it loses its repuation as a stable and quick browser. The more frequent crashes since 1.0.7 have started a little buzz of criticism. The most important thing mozilla should do NOW is to address the instability problems quickly and completely.

Put the geeks to work on that. Put the biz-dev-marketing people to work on NYTimes.

Re:Marketing-- okay. Crashing-- no!

[trygstad]

Mine doesn't crash too often but if they don't fix the memory leaks soon I may have to switch to Opera. I know I'm a "power user" and probably not too many people keep 16 tabs open at once, but all too often I launch Task Manager to find that Firefox is chewing up 97% of my system resources, and I'm really tired of it. I love Firefox otherwise--I was a contributor listed in the NY Times ad.

Re:Ordinary users don't know what web standards ar

[Prophet of Nixon]

Speaking of JavaScript, is there any good reason why Firefox can get and set the .src attribute of an imageButton (an image with a tagName of input), but can't read its .complete attribute? Its been driving me nuts all morning... Other than that, v1.5 hasn't seriously bothered me yet, though I don't like the way it dumps CSS and program errors to the javascript console without separating them from the javascript errors.

The only relevant measure

[trifish]

The only relevant measurement that matters is the percentage of visitors using Firefox at big sites like google.com. Someone should ask Google to reveal their stats about browser usage among their visitors. Number of downloads is indeed misleading (I downloaded Firefox but don't use it).

Re:The only relevant measure

[BCW2]

At work (white box store) we install Firefox on most computers. We only download it on our own when a new version is released. We do installs from a ripped CD so I can tell you that the download number is several hundred short of the installed number. It's faster than downloading each time. I think the google numbers would be more accurate than downloads.

Numbers probably are skewed

[Colourspace]

Since 'discovering' (read - informed by the froth-mouthed slashdot hordes) FF myself only 18 months or so ago I have downloaded it around 8-10 times for my own personal use, rebuilds etc. So as far as unique users go I would expect the number to be at least half of this, if not less. Shame though because it is a nice browser.

Relative truth...

[Kjella]

So if Firefox have 150+ million downloads, and another software project has 15+ million downloads doesn't that give me a pretty good idea about their respective popularity? Not that 150 million downloads = 150 million unique people downloading Firefox, or that 150 million downloads = 150 million users or anything like that. So you don't have comparable numbers with IE since it ships with Windows. But you can still compare it to say, every other downloadable application and figure out "Hey, it's actually very popular". That people choose to compare apples to oranges isn't really my problem.

ADBLOCK!

[Spy der Mann]

Just include adblock by default in Firefox. Then promote it as one of the advantages of using Firefox over IE.

Re:resort to using third-class promotional tactics

[booyabazooka]

the lowest common denominator

What are they dividing?

Who cares?

[Sottilde]

So the firefox community has "stepped down" to the level of reporting a download count. Does anyone else think this is much ado about nothing?

Firefox fans

[Anonymous Coward]

It's hardly a secret that firefox fans suck ass ...

Slashdot Quality

[WankersRevenge]

I've been reading Slashdot for six years or so, and it seems to me, the quality of stories have really taken a nose dive. Or better put, stories written to incite the community have been getting greater air time. I read, write, and sometimes moderate, but stories like this makes me scratch my head and wonder why I even visit this site anymore.

Re:Slashdot Quality

[secondbase]

I'm with you. The number of /. articles I've forwarded or mentioned to others has gone down: I'll be that if we did a poll, it would be down for all. Or maybe not, maybe down for old users, up for people who started reading recently.

So who's the fanboy?

[cocoamix]

It's a fact that Internet Explorer is inferior to Firefox with its extensive collection of extensions and ability to support qualified web standards,

Why must he denigrate IE so? He sounds like such a fanboy.

Honestly...

[oahazmatt]

If it's admittedly better than MSIE, why not advertise it? How else is anyone to know of it's existence? It's not like Firefox is bundled with it's own operating system, and a great deal of people just gloss over banner ads.

How dare they advertise a superior product! For shame!

The numbers game is a fair way to win hearts.

[hernick]

Are you a mere software user? Is your knowledge of computers so mundane that your opinion is worthless? No. You can tell good software from bad; deep down, you know that Microsoft is evil and that Open Source is good.

You are painfully aware that the common computer user is doesn't have the skills or knowledge to choose the right software. He has seen too much Microsoft publicity. He is corrupted by the Microsoft-financed "get-the-facts" propaganda campaign. When it comes to technology, his mind is no longer rational - thanks to the mental corruption spread by Microsoft's wiles.

This is why, when it comes to Software Evangelism, everything goes. In order to properly spread the religion that is Firefox, you must accept that all IE-users are heretics, unwittingly brainwashed minions of Microsoft. Carefully wean them from the propaganda-machine that corrupts their mind! A reasonable argument will not convince them. You must resort to lying, embellishing the truth, deleting their IE icon and replacing it with Firefox (with an IE-like skin, using the old IE icon (if necessary)), blaming all their troubles on IE and the spyware it brings in, as well as any necessary use of force, which may include voluntarily infecting their copy of IE with spyware so that the slightest use of it brings forth POPUPSPAM POPUPSPAM and more POPUPSPAM to their desktop.

Sir, you say that it is unfair to use numbers to promote Firefox - you must be an heretic! See the error of your ways: when it comes to Firefox, all is fair game, because WE know best, WE know that Microsoft and their evil Internet Explorer Browser are evil sources of evil software infection and providers of a sub-par (and quite evil) browsing experience. We know better than the users, for that WE are good, and WE will make THEM see the light, at all costs!

For That We Are Software Evangelists
Let's spread Thory Bird & Fiery Fox
Let's dance with the Good Penguins
And Crush the Evil GateShutters

whatever

[grumpyman]

I really don't care the number thing but heck, one of our marketing guy is using firefox and proclaim it's a better alternative than IE (after convinced by another sys-admin) - that's all I need to know in getting me to try firefox on my machines.

Re:Ordinary users don't know what web standards ar

[Kjella]

What I find more immature is site designers who make sites which ONLY work in Gecko (and not Opera and specially not IE!) and then complain that the other browsers are not standards compliant.

Show me a standards-compliant page that renders differently in Opera. I do have *one* example where they render differently, where I think Opera is the one being standards-compliant. In my experience they're almost pixel-perfect twins though. As for IE... you don't even have to *try* to make that render crazy.

Yes

[inode_buddha]

"...but does the community need to resort to using third-class promotional tactics with total downloads number?"

Yes. Because you can be certain that the competition will use third-class promotional tactics. Some say that they already have.
Much like fighting with an idiot, they drag you down to their level and then beat you with experience.

Advert Police

[Vinnie_333]

Total downloads is a totally honest way of reporting success. It's not a count of users or a measurement of their satisfaction, but it is a pretty good yard stick of success in the market place. Only a complete moron would think that 15 million downloads = 15 million satisfied unique users. Just like McDonald's "X Billion (products) served" does not equal X billion satisfied unique customers. Some are repeat customers, some were one time users, many weren't satisfied. But, unless the product was desireable for whatever reason, the number of products sold never would have gotten so high.

Re:Affectionate?

[Anonymous Coward]

you point out that the word "affectionate" is indeed misused as a verb (which is presumably what the parent is referring to) in another post, and yet you flame the guy anyway. why? why hurt?

that's not very affectionate.

err, well you know

[SQLz]

..but does the community need to resort to using third-class promotional tactics with total downloads number?

We do what the people demand and they demand big numbers! Huge ones! You could have the best product in the world but without big numbers and shameless advertising that the average joe eats up like cupcakes, noone will use it.

So what metric would you prefer?

[Red Flayer]

So, total downloads is misleading, huh?

What metric would you prefer? Installed base? Good luck getting those numbers for Firefox, never mind the fact that Microsoft has the upper hand with IE by default.

Or perhaps the point of TFA is that Firefox shouldn't do marketing and publicity, and just let it spread by word-of-mouth. I'd be fine with that, if Firefox was pre-installed and set as default browser on every PC sold, like its major competitor.

The fact is, 150 million downloads IS a meaningful figure. It shows that Firefox is not some bit player with a likely inferior product. It shows that many, many people believe it to be a good browser -- which means that both corporate execs and Joe Sixpack are more likely to not dismiss it out of hand.

At any rate, I've seen enough product reviews written by the author to believe that he's a shill and a shameless self-promoter anyway. Because, of course, Firefox shouldn't promote itself with one of the only hard metrics available, but submitting your own 'articles' to other websites is fine.

I'm not saying that Gundeep Hora submitted this one... but if you google his name, all his 'articles' linked to in other aggregator sites like Slashdot seem to be submitted anonymously. More so than most authors.

Re:So what metric would you prefer?

[DaveCBio]

He's got a point. I think it's a far more telling stat to poll websites and see what users are connecting with and I don't mean just tech savvy sites like Slashdot. That's far more meaningful. Who cares how many users downloaded Firefox if they aren't using it. I have FF and Opera installed mostly to check out any web work I do. I use IE out of conveniencee more than anything and since I have a decent AV program and I keep my system up to date I have yet to have any security issues.

Re:So what metric would you prefer?

[Red Flayer]

"I think it's a far more telling stat to poll websites and see what users are connecting with and I don't mean just tech savvy sites like Slashdot."

But why would wou want your publicity numbers to show that you're still just a significant minority player? Defeats the whole purpose of marketing.

I agree, your stat is more useful to those that are already in the know about Firefox. But to the people the ads and publicity are targeted to, 150 million downloads is much more effective that 22% (if that) traffic.

Re:Ordinary users don't know what web standards ar

[orthogonal]

Any non-geek user doesn't understand what is wrong with IE. You can't verbally demonstrate what is wrong with it.

Actually, I've found you can verbalize what's wrong with IE quite easily:

If you continue to use IE, you will get viruses and Trojans

works pretty effectively.

Also effective:

If you switch to Firefox and install a few simple extensions, you won't see advertisements.

And the closer:

And if you really need to view a page in IE (and you usually won't), there's another extension that will let you do that.

Re:Affectionate?

[spellraiser]

Ahem.

The post your are replying to is intended as what is commonly referred to as 'sarcasm'. Sorry if that was unclear.

Now get on that train! Looks like you need some indoctrining too!

Stupid Kids

[Anonymous Coward]

There are immature people on the net, they are everywere. Being on slashdot you should know that. They can't mod them -1 troll yet. To lump these people with the everyone else is stupid. They may be part of the community, but they are not the whole community. A problem is that these people tend to much loader than everyone else. Until then, ignore them and maybe go work on a ranking system for their forums.

Re:resort to using third-class promotional tactics

[Anonymous Coward]

People / Intelligence

Sloppy statistics is the tool of the devil

[hey!]

incarnate of course in the persons of practicioners of marketing They indeed perform many useful and construction functions, but informing the public in the truest sense of the word is not one of them.

Unfortunately, since the devil makes such free use of out contextless "statistics", the side of the angels cannot forbear to use them as well. In most cases I detest this kind of reasoning, but since we're talking about counteracting one incomplete truth which functions as a lie with an equal and opposite incomplete truth, I'm inclined to give it a pass. A public holding two partial truths is more informed than a public holding only one; a public that is unsure of anything is better informed than a public that is sure of something that is untrue.

Troll

[Lord_Dweomer]

While I won't feed the trolls website by giving him the traffic...I will say this about the following quote:

"but does the community need to resort to using third-class promotional tactics with total downloads number?""

As an advertising executive, all I have to say to this guy is WELCOME TO THE WORLD OF NEW MEDIA!

These "third-class" promotional tactics are HIGHLY effective, and cut through the other garbage out there. And aside from that, I would much rather see a company relying on the goodwill of its users and "fanboyism" to get ahead than to plant shills on forums, etc.

So Apple's immature?

[TMarvelous]

Apple has touted milestones in iTunes just about everytime one has been hit (song downloads, video downloads). Does that make them immature? I guess the billions served by McDonalds is also childish.

Active Directory deployment

[DraconPern]

Let's not forget that you can also install firefox via active directory and even have it managable now.

MSI for Firefox

If anything the numbers are under-reporting...

[Anonymous Coward]

They have no way of knowing how many users downloaded Firefox from a mirror. So their number is probably a low estimate.

Slashdot downloaded

[mycall]

4,177,023,409 times!!

It is retarded

[Anonymous Coward]

It is retarded to expect that a large group of users will be less retarded than another big group of users.

But the reasonning behind this complaint is kind of lame, what's the deal of showing the number of downloads? And why would that be called immature? don't really understand the point of the complaint nor the reason it was approved to be posted here

How sad

[obedeith]

What is the problem with displaying how many downloads an application has? It's helpful information when deciding whether to download it or not. What is the problem with advertising your work? Surely if you make the effort to create something as good as Firefox then you would want people to actually use it. I don't just mean the 'elite' or those 'in the know'. I mean everyone. Therefore you advertise. It make perfect sense to advertise in this case.

Re:How sad

[NadaTech]

The reason so many exploits have been discovered in Microsoft products is because it is the most widely used and people actively seek those exploits. The more users an application has, the more actively hackers will be searching for exploits. This is why I agree that statistics on use should be avoided. ...of course it could also be that those who search for exploits in Microsoft products do so for the sole purpose of causing harm to Microsoft as a company. This will get me labeled as a troll and kill my karma, but it is non-existent anyway so I'll say it: Everyone knows it is quite possible that a default install of Linux has many more security issues than a default install of Windows XP SP2.

Re:resort to using third-class promotional tactics

[eepok]

I completely agree. But also...

Am I the only one that sees that pandering to the lowest common denominator for a GOOD product actually benefits everyone? If less people use Internet Explorer (because nobody updates anyway) then less people can have their lives/businesses interupted by malware. Thus, the big numbers convincing simple people for the sake of good, is GOOD.

It's like health. Stay healthy, and you will live longer and more comfortabley. Not many people are healthy for the sake of their own health. But, tell guys that girls will have sex with them because they look healthy and -WHAM!- guys are hitting the gym.

whos Sickly?

[minus_273]

is he a new editor on slashdot and why is he cout of control?

Soylent Green

[KarateExplosions]

The burgers are people!

And with 175 Billion served, they have done us a wonderful population-control service.

Re:Soylent Green

[just_another_sean]

And with 175 Billion served, they have done us a wonderful population-control service.

I know you jest but given the nutritional value of their food I wonder how far off the mark you really are? ;-)

Re:Soylent Green

[Thavius]

McDonald's comes up with a new character to help promote a new burger line:

Soylent McGreen.

Re:Soylent Green

[ShieldW0lf]

Ridiculous. I'll have you know people are actually very tasty and nutritious when prepared properly. Whereas MacDonalds....

Re:WTF?!??!

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not a very good translator. I wanted to say "I owned your momma" in 12speak, but it translated it to "I OWNED UR MOMA".

Not misleading, just reporting a different figure

[Xeger]

If anyone were out there trying to imply that Firefox has 150,000,000 users *because* of their 150 million downloads, then I might be inclined to agree with you.

(In fact, it's totally within reason that Firefox *does* have that many users -- since most web analytics firms place FF at about 11% market share, and there're in excess of a billion people using the Web on the planet. But I'm not going to make that claim since I haven't done my research.)

So, what does the figure "150 million" represent? Simply and honestly put, this is the number of times someone has gone out of his way to install Firefox because he was unhappy with his built-in browser (MSIE or Safari).

Yes, some of these downloads were existing Firefox fanatics who were reinstalling their OS. Yes, some of these people never installed after downloading. But there are sources of error in the other direction, too: download caches, Firefox-on-CD, corporate deployments and secondary download sources all put a dent in Firefox's download rates.

So, take this number for what it is and be happy!

Re:resort to using third-class promotional tactics

[crazyjimmy]

How is announcing the # of downloads different than McDonalds bragging about the number of burgers served? Yes, if we think about it, we can fairly say that not every download was unique, but we can also say that not every McDonalds burger that was sold was sold to a single person. We don't get mad at McDonalds for that, though (we get mad cause those "Billions of Burgers" have all been crappy :P).

That being said, 150 million downloads is a significant number. First off, it's big. I mean really really big. But Secondly, it's a sign that people are still using Firefox. For every time that the same person downloads another copy of firefox, that person is quietly saying that Firefox works for them. That's pretty significant.

All that being said, saying the "Firefox Community, Sickly Out of Control" in this regard is over-hype, and actually worse than bragging about a downloads number. It's creating a major false-impression. I thought the title meant that the FireFox community was fracturing and that 2.0 was going to be seriously delayed or some such. I thought that they were turning into a porn-download-machine (more than it already is, being able to connect to the internet :P), or taking money from microsoft to sabotage their own product. I thought they were hatching a scheme to turn everyone's computers into nodes for the ultimate evil planet-controlling network, and demanding that the world leaders give them $$$$$ or we'll all be blown straight to hell. Something.

Saying "yay, yay, 150+ million downloads. Microsoft sucks. we rock. Go us." is not sickly out of control. Maybe immature...maybe.

--Jimmy

I've got nothing better to do with my bandwidth

[jheath314]

Gotta agree with you about the whole "rough approximations" thing being no better than making up a number on the spot.

For all we know, those millions of downloads could just be the result of a few hundred people downloading the thing thousands of times over. Those fanboys have no restraint.

Anyways, I've gotta get back to my 19,234th firefox download. Ciao!

The poster made an assumption

[ecorona]

The truth is that we don't know what the people over there in Mozilla were thinking when they decided to report the numbers. It may not be what you think. I feel that reporting the numbers excites people and makes people happy that such a good product is getting recognition. It doesn't necessarily have to be a statement like "Our product is better than yours because we have millions of downloads".

Sorry, left out a word in that last sentance

[bogie]

I meant to say Hype is what gets users, quality is what keeps them.

I assume he never ate at McDonalds

[lexbaby]

... where "billions and billions served."

Remember when they had the numbers that counted how many millions were served? Every couple months the number would go up.

I bet he thinks eBay feedback ratings, amazon.com ratings and the slashdot rating model are immature too. People want to know what other people think about products and services.

In a market where "everyone uses Internet Explorer" I think the number of downloads do matter in its advertising and creating buzz. Even if it's a rough estimate, it illustrates that Firefox must be a good enough product that people are switching.

Re:Ordinary users don't know what web standards ar

[Lawmune]

Not so much the development team or Mozilla marketing fanboys but basically a pretentious, self-righteous, deluded few.

When browsing the web, I see "best viewed with Firefox" buttons quite frequently. Every once in awhile, I'll even run into a site that uses a browser detection script that either tells me to switch browsers (I currently use Opera) or deliberately prevents me from reading the content. Luckily, I can mask my browser, but it's still annoying and having to do that prevents accurate browser stats from being collected.

The official (and correct, IMO) stance of the Mozilla Foundation is that they do not support "best viewed with Firefox" buttons. Unfortunately, overenthusiastic fans need to be reminded of this far too often, even on spreadfirefox.com (which I generally think is a good site)

I've written about the "best viewed with" phenomenon here, with a comparative look (using Google) at how many people create sites that are "best viewed with Firefox" versus people who make sites that are "best viewed with Opera".

Cause it's true...

[Anonymous Coward]

They're only saying it, because its true. IE does suck.

Rather than just spending all that money...

[DreadfulGrape]

...on expensive newspaper advertising, perhaps Team Firefox could do more to evangelize the web development community to *not* write any more IE-only applications. Sure seems like this is a big stumbling block to widespread acceptance of non-IE browsers.

Disagree with the Slashdot Majority...

[Anonymous Coward]

...get labeled a troll! Slashdot: geeks escaping persecution so they can persecute dissenting geeks.

Inferior Logic

[szembek]

It's a fact that Internet Explorer is inferior to FireFox

Everyone is entitled to their opinion, but in a submission criticizing the FireFox Community of 'immature fanboyism', isn't it kind of stupid to make this statement?

1 word, 1st word - 3 syllables

[Anonymous Coward]

Sa - far- i

kk thx

FF users aren't immature

[Anonymous Coward]

FF users aren't immature. Ur mom is a fag!!!

Other dubious tactics

[chrisbeach]

I agree with the author. Firefox deserves to rise above IE6, but the use of guerilla marketing tactics reflects badly on its community.

A year ago Firefox developer Blake Ross encouraged the FF community to file comments [and positive votes] on the feedback section of CNET's Download.com website. This allowed Firefox to rise to first place on CNET's list of most popular software. Ballot stuffing, anyone?

In itself, these instances are not serious issues. However, the community should bear in mind the long-term effect of over-hyping Firefox. The media loves to build things up, and then later break them down. In the case of Firefox, the media will simply have a larger bubble to burst.

Re:Other dubious tactics

[KarateExplosions]

A year ago Firefox developer Blake Ross encouraged the FF community to file comments [and positive votes] on the feedback section of CNET's Download.com website. This allowed Firefox to rise to first place on CNET's list of most popular software. Ballot stuffing, anyone?

I fail to see why that would be considered ballot stuffing any more than, say, a politician going out and telling his supporters, "Vote for me, and tell your friends!"

Now, if he had said, "Vote for Firefox, clear your cache, vote for us again, clear your cache, vote for us again...", then THAT would be ballot-stuffing. But merely asking people who enjoy your product to share their opinions with the community at large is hardly controversial.

Re:Other dubious tactics

[bunratty]

Asking a group of people who like Firefox to share their opinion results in a skewed sample, with a disproportionate number of respondants giving positive feedback. It's not really ballot stuffing, and not really astroturfing, but it does result in Firefox seeming more popular than it really is among the general population.

Re:Ordinary users don't know what web standards ar

[saundersr]

those that I work with assume that 150 million people can't be wrong. those within our tech department are always publicizing Firefox, so it's no wonder people use it - when they're told how popular it is, most people are at least interested in giving it a shot. there are those people, of course, who don't understand standards as the parent stated, and they don't care how many downloads Firefox has had. IE is working for them currently and they don't see a need to switch.

Yup, it is really tacky when you publish

[QuietLagoon]

how many copies have been sold.

Go to heaven.

[Anonymous Coward]

Your comments are so pure that you could go to heaven. After reaching god, you could be promoted to a "Microsoft Angel" (without the bugs), and you would be happy for the rest of your ethereal existence.

Billions and Billions Served

[TeachingMachines]

I seem to remember reporting numbers worked for McDonalds; heck, it was on every roadside sign (I think they stopped at 92 billion after Seinfeld made fun of them). Yes, I think its important to let people know that A LOT of other people trust the product that is not under the dominion of Microsoft, because otherwise they wouldn't use it.

Re:resort to using third-class promotional tactics

[racebit]

It's almost like complaining that american idol voting is unfair becuase people call in multiple times. Or its like saying that McDonalds has "billions and billions" served. They haven't served billions and billions of different people, but filled billions and billions of orders.

Sounds to me like someone was just looking for something to complain about. Firefox has been retrieved from various servers to clients 150 million times. Maybe not 150 million people, but that was not the fact stated.

How is that a "immature" statement?

You mean, like Slashdot??!

[tomcres]

I have the hardest time reading Slashdot at work because the layout gets all screwed up and I often get text overwriting itself near the bottom of the page. Doesn't happen with Firefox at home, but with IE at work, it's a huge problem. Given that IE has higher market penetration and the site is supported by advertising, you would think that they'd pay more attention to making it work with IE! I mean, it's not like I even have the option of using Firefox. I don't control what goes on my company laptop!

Re:resort to using third-class promotional tactics

[cp.tar]

What are they dividing?

Why, users, of course!

Ever heard of Divide et impera?

Duh!

Re:the answer is clearly "YES"

[bmajik]

"It's a fact that Internet Explorer is inferior to Firefox..."

I'll only believe that IE is inferior to Firefox for end user applications if lots and lots of end users agree.

Right. The original statement bothered me also. The story author's claim is pretty dubious. In consideration of the word used ("inferior"), which has derogotory connotations, it's hard to beleive that this statement is the result of some factual, objective analysis.

What people need to understand about complex systems like software, automobiles, governments, or musical preference is that there is rarely a black and white concept of "inferior".

No, for some defined set of criteria, a given candidate either satisfies them to the satisfaction of the evaluator or it doesn't. Even then, criteria are typically weighted and the weights aren't always known (even by the person that developed the criteria.. who can say that they care 3x more about the gender of the vocalist in a band than the speed of the drummer? some people probably have such an unwritten preference but couldn't articulate it).

So, if the statement had read "for a majority of home users who do casual web surfing, Firefox has numerous advantages over IE6", with some definitions around "home user" and "casual web surfing", then it's not necessarily an objectionable statement.

But since it wasn't said that way, it's easy to dismiss as fanboyism, and an uninspired consideration of the products and factors involved.

More concretely, if your web browser scenarios include

• out-of-box integration with NTLM authentication
• running ActiveX controls, and sandboxing / restricting use of same

then firefox probably isn't "superior" to IE6, and probably not even a better choice. Then there are other more subjective critiera - Firefox seems to crash more than IE6 for me, and its memory usage is also much higher. It takes longer to repaint its windows when i wake the laptop from hibernate, and also longer to start accepting input events. Those may not be reproducible for other people, but they are for me, so in consideration of the listed requirements above, and the subjective ones below, it's hard to swallow a "IE is factually inferior to Firefox" argument. It's a twsited definition of "inferior" when it in practice translates to "works better than for the scenarios that are important to me"

Who wrote that anyway?

[jotate]

The answer is the Editor-In-Chief of CoolTechZone.com, Gundeep Hora. He (she?) is one of three people working on that site. As far as I can tell there are three things on the site. 1) A forum not often visited. 2) A shit ton of ads. 3) Bullshit news reports. 1) Go look at it. Most of the posts come from the three admins. 2) Half of the shit on there is an advertisement. Text ads in the left column. Box ads on the right column. Banner ads at the top. Banner ads at the bottom. And in article ads that pop up on mouse-over. 3) All the news reports are written by the three admin. They fall into one of two categories, as far as I can tell. They're either opinionated and devoid of fact (such as the aforementioned). Or they're summaries of other articles from other news sites with no mention of where they got the information. --- So, what it seems that we have is a bullshit news website created to generate revenue that was just slashdotted. I hope they don't get paid by the number of hits to their site. --- Interesting side note, at the bottom it says they're a division of iTech Media. Apparently, the future is pink...? http://idealfoundation.com/ben/

Re:Who wrote that anyway?

[jotate]

(I should've used the Preview button.)

The answer is the Editor-In-Chief of CoolTechZone.com, Gundeep Hora. He (she?) is one of three people working on that site. As far as I can tell there are three things on the site. 1) A forum not often visited. 2) A shit ton of ads. 3) Bullshit news reports.

1) Go look at it. Most of the posts come from the three admins.

2) Half of the shit on there is an advertisement. Text ads in the left column. Box ads on the right column. Banner ads at the top. Banner ads at the bottom. And in article ads that pop up on mouse-over.

3) All the news reports are written by the three admin. They fall into one of two categories, as far as I can tell. They're either opinionated and devoid of fact (such as the aforementioned). Or they're summaries of other articles from other news sites with no mention of where they got the information.

---

So, what it seems that we have is a bullshit news website created to generate revenue that was just slashdotted. I hope they don't get paid by the number of hits to their site.

---

Interesting side note, at the bottom it says they're a division of iTech Media. Apparently, the future is pink...?

http://idealfoundation.com/ben/

Crossing chasms

[Nygard]

Different marketing messages resonate with different people. The classic problem of "Crossing the Chasm" involves expanding a product's base from the early adopters willing to take risks to the more conservative mainstream.

The early adopters ask questions like "what advantage can I gain?"

The mainstream asks "who do I know that uses this?"

Advertising your high levels of innovation attracts the early adopters but repels the mainstream.

Advertising how many other users there are attracts the mainstream, but apparently repels some segment of the early adopters. (Other early adopters prefer to gloat about how much earlier they were on the scene.)

This is not immature, misleading, nor "fanboyism".

1 word. 1st word, 3 syllables

[1336.5]

sa-far-i

Re:resort to using third-class promotional tactics

[milimetric]

I disagree. I love the summary and I would like to add:

If Microsoft wanted to, they could post THEIR number of downloads. Then it would be like those cartoons where the little rat shoots his little gun 30 times and then the big rat pulls out a gun 20 times the size of the little rat and turns him charcoal. I mean, what would Microsoft's number be, 30 billion?

slandering IE is bad, and then he does it?

[chrismg2003]

Did no one else notice that he comments that "degrading Internet Explorer is ridiculous" and then in the very next line he says "It's a fact that Internet Explorer is inferior to Firefox". seems to me he should follow his own advice.

"affectionate" isn't a verb

[alcmaeon]

The author would like Firefox users to not "affectionate" Firefox so much. I, for one, would like the author to get a dictionary.

6 months of latest firefox, 0 crashes

[Vexorian]

say bye bye to your statement

I totally agree with this!

[AquaFox]

I do totally agree with this. Fanboyism sux. I've seen a lot of kids saying, "this is the best," when they havn't tried anything else. That's just stupid.

Heh..

[CuriOus CoOkie]

I totally agree. I think Firefox should be promoted using any means possible. It's not like the "misleading numbers" are having a drastic effect on Internet Explorer users and prospective Firefox downloaders. I think it's just to show that...Firefox kicks IE's ass. And in the past there were numerous occasions where news broadcasts on TV and online were degrading Internet Explorer due to its holes and being "so easy to bug". Firefox can automatically download whatever updates it needs, as opposed to going to the Microsoft website and taking 20 minutes of your life to keep your computer protected. In my opinion, unless Microsoft comes out with an explorer that can hold over 20 tabs in one window, I would rather stick with my Firefox.

Re:Affectionate?

[iBod]

I am affectionate towards Mary

I do not 'affectionate' Mary!

It could matter less....but doubtful.

[HotBBQ]

Does anyone else here have any idea why any reasonable person would care at all about how Mozilla advertises? I don't care if they say it cures cancer and has been downloaded primarily on Tuesdays between 2:17 PM and 4:52 PM. It's a free web broswer. Some people think it is better than IE. Some people think Joe Dirt drives it to work. In other words, not important.

Misleading?

[bunratty]

Do you really think that isn't misleading? That it doesn't make the average person think that there are 100 million users?

How is that misleading? Firefox does have about 100 million users. There are about 1 billion Internet users, with about 10% of them using Firefox.

Re:Misleading?

[Bogtha]

Web statistics (and I use that word loosely) that companies like OneStat sell are highly dubious, for all kinds of different reasons. I'd explain exactly what they do wrong, but their technical specs are a bit lacking, wouldn't you say? If you don't believe they are full of it, try reading this:

The OneStat.com solutions provide executives, marketers and webmasters with answers to critical e-business questions such as:

• Who is visiting my website?

Yeah, really convincing and doesn't sound like snake-oil peddlers at all.

Re:Misleading?

[bunratty]

I never said web stats are 100% accurate. Of course there are some inaccuracies in web stats. One recent study found up to a 40% discrepancy between two web stats sources. However, it's one thing to say they're somewhat inaccurate, and quite another to say they're "full of it".

It still seems to me there are about 100 million Firefox users, as opposed to 200 million or 50 million. If you have a better estimate, let us know what it is and the data and techniques you used to arrive at it.

Re:Misleading?

[fatboy]

None of the links you provided say that the user agent cannot be tabulated within a reasonable amount of accuracy.

Re:Misleading?

[Bogtha]

I never said web stats are 100% accurate.

So how accurate are they?

One recent study found up to a 40% discrepancy between two web stats sources. However, it's one thing to say they're somewhat inaccurate, and quite another to say they're "full of it".

To which study are you referring?

It still seems to me there are about 100 million Firefox users, as opposed to 200 million or 50 million. If you have a better estimate, let us know what it is and the data and techniques you used to arrive at it.

I've got the most accurate estimate on the planet.

I don't know.

I welcome numbers more accurate than that, if there is a basis for believing that they are accurate.

Re:Misleading?

[Bogtha]

None of the links you provided say that the user agent cannot be tabulated within a reasonable amount of accuracy.

Did you actually read the articles? How do you propose that this be measured, and what is your definition of "reasonable amount of accuracy"?

Re:Misleading?

[Anc]

So what is your point exactly? That we can't talk about any statistics or adoption rates whatsoever, because they are inherently inaccurate? That'd be absurd, of course we can as long as we remember to take them with a pinch of salt. The margin of error can be calculated and it doesn't make the statistic useless. We're talking about advertisements here and no one sane complains about inaccuracies this big in advertisements. The 100-million-downloads claim isn't that far off, anyway. Last but not least, don't know about you but I'd rather see more Firefox users making the web more open place than break my head over poor users, tricked into using the program by deceptive statistic.

Re:Misleading?

[bunratty]

If you take the Firefox usage share data from various stats sources as a sample of the actual usage share of Firefox, you'll find that Firefox usage is 10.1% +/- 1.5%. This means there's a 95% chance Firefox usage is between 7% and 13%. That makes it very likely that there are between 70 million and 130 million Firefox users. An easy way to say that is that there are about 100 million Firefox users.

Re:Misleading?

[bunratty]

To which study are you referring?

I'm referring to the Forrester Research report described in the linked article. Some people have read that article and come to the same conclusion you have — that web stats are so completely unreliable as to be useless. If you read the article carefully, you'll find it says no such thing. It merely states that stats from web analytics firms are not as accurate as sometimes claimed. You can see from comparing stats from different sources that reported Firefox usage may vary by up to 30-40%, but I can't see any evidence that the stats figures are a factor of two off, much less an order of magnitude off as you seem to suggest.

Mod Stupidity

[iBod]

Jeeze - who the hell is modding /. these days? An infinate number of jabbering monkeys who could't comprehend humor, the nuances of language, or irony - even if their hairy little assholes depended on it?

Shame on you all!

Re:Ordinary users don't know what web standards ar

[Bogtha]

Please be a bit more careful with your terminology. There's a big difference between an HTML attribute and a Javascript property, and a big difference between an HTML tag and an HTML element.

is there any good reason why Firefox can get and set the .src attribute of an imageButton (an image with a tagName of input)

I'm going to interpret that as "why Firefox can get and set the src property of an HTMLInputElement corresponding to an <input> element with a type attribute of image.

The reason that Firefox can do this is because DOM 2 HTML defines a src property for this interface, and the Gecko developers attempt to conform to this specification.

but can't read its .complete attribute?

I'm going to interpret that as "but can't read its complete property?". Firefox can't read that property because this is a proprietary Microsoft property, and the Gecko developers only reverse engineer and emulate proprietary Microsoft properties when there's significant compatibility advantages (i.e. when lots of sites use the proprietary property with degraded behaviour or errors when it isn't available).

I don't like the way it dumps CSS and program errors to the javascript console without separating them from the javascript errors.

Take the Firebug extension for a spin, you'll probably find it useful.

Recent Firefox Releases *crash* all the time

[ClarkEvans]

The recent releases of Firefox (1.5 and up) crash all the time for myself and my clients. I've got a custom XUL app running on Firefox and I'm seriously beginning to regret this decision. I would have been better off using plain-old DHTML and supporting Safari (for OS/X people), and perhaps Opera (for the Windows people).

The crashes are simply out-of-control.

No Publicity is Bad Publicity in This Case

[JBrow]

Considering that the fight for market share faces an uphill battle against IE, I'd say the subject line (borrowed from the Entertainment Industry mantra) says it all. Make noise for Firefox, it's worth it!

In Soviet Microsoft...

[Anonymous Coward]

Everyone uses IE!

Re:Ordinary users don't know what web standards ar

[Kuvter]

extensions

That word alone is the reason I've used Opera over Firefox from the very beginning.

I think the non-geek community would go for those headlines, but then again I'm a geek so I might be missing something.

Re:the answer is clearly "YES"

[langelgjm]

Funny, it always seemed like Firefox's memory use was much less than IE's, at least for me. Right now I have Slashdot, Wikipedia, and the OED open in both Firefox and IE:

Firefox: 39,172 KB
IE: 50,472 KB

And I consistently see figures like those. Not that it matters much, what with 4 GB memory (only 3 of which show up in Windows :-(

Re:the answer is clearly "YES"

[langelgjm]

Oh, and IE just crashed as I was closing its three windows. No joke.

Control Firefox, Out Of Sickly Community

[bad boy mateo]

Sorry - you aren't gonna like this comment: What I am most interested in is the stability of a product/service. I tried FireFox for one week and removed it for two reasons; it renders differently than what I am used to with IE, and because it crashed/froze 4 times in 40 hours. HOWEVER, I am a status Quo Kinda guy. When I'm driving I don't make full stops at EVERY stop sign, nor do I obey the speed limit ALL the time. So why would IE's non-compliance to standards bother me? Standards are mostly a guideline/suggestion/goal. If you had to choose between a feature rich superior car that suddenly stalls every 400 miles, or a car that wasn't as "superior", but much more reliable...? And if we are going to talk numbers, how much money has "The FireFox Foundation" given away/back to the community? As far as "The Gates Foundation" is concerned, those are numbers that are VERY persuasive. Nuf said?

Re:Control Firefox, Out Of Sickly Community

[Zphbeeblbrox]

Your argument would make some sense if the base facts were correct. Since a proper install of a stable firefox release does not freeze hardly ever the rest of your statement falls apart.

It may be that you tried an unstable developer build. Or perhaps your install corrupted (happens to IE too). Or you used an unstable extension( At least Firefox warns you before you install it) Or your OS install was corrupted. None of those things are the fault of Firefox and all of them occur in equal proportion to IE installs (maybe even more). So one has to wonder if you really thought that through or not.

I can see his point....

[whizzler]

The problem is that when you take out a full-page ad and you're main talking point is the number of downloads, then that is what potential users take away from it. Instead, the focus should be on the amount of unique features and stability that Firefox offers over IE. Touting the numbers is almost like saying "c'mon everyone else is doing it" and that's the same herd-mentality that Microsoft proponents are so often criticized for having. But as a measure of market-share, there really isn't a better way to measure how many installs of Firefox vs. IE are out there. The only other way is independent polls which will never be accepted as accurate either.

Ok

[flyinwhitey]

"Poor MS bigots, can't take a little of your own medicine eh?"

So, you're proud of behaving like MS now?

And that "fanboyism" discussed in the article, you just did it. And the funniest thing is you are such a raging fanboy you'll try to deny it.

Re:Ok

[Anonymous Coward]

Personally I don't like Firefox. Never have. Obviously because of that I have to post AC lest my karma be negative by morning.

None the less, over time I've downloaded Firefox at least 5 or 6 times, and it's installed in damn near every reasonably up to date linux install i've touched recently. I still don't like it.

I will give you this however. Counting downloads is on par with MS talking about IE's installed base. Both are extremely misleading when it comes to actual usage.

Microsoft does the same thing, in a different way

[voxel]

Microsoft ships IE with the operating system and killed off Netscape this way.

Sounds like 3rd rate tatics to me, with a FREE browser none-the-less.

If you think advertising number of downloads is playing dirty, then so be it.

Microsoft fights dirty all the time, you expect to win as the underdog without fighting dirty back? You are living in a fantasy land.

Proof positive...

[Anonymous Coward]

that things that become trendy...suck. If people are willing to stoop low to advertise to these people, then it's only a matter of time before the same immature lures used to get them to use the software will also lead to them to demand immature changes to the software. I don't want to see Firefox blingified and crapified to appease the least common denominator of the population (who also happens to be the most retarded).

These are the same people who think you can encrypt your IP address so the evil *AA can't get you...:(

Feh

[Fordiman]

This is the same magazine that says OS X is 'Doomed' because of a total of four (four?!) critical bugs in it.

Four.

Number one, I know that OS-X is a bit buggier than that; my Mac, while pretty stable, is far from Rock Solid.

Number two, four versus how many in Windows and Linux?!

Number three, given points one, two, and the present market spread between Windows, Linux, the BSDs and OS-X, I'm going to venture saying that OS stability has never been a selling point, just a griping point.

What?

[rspress]

And how many platforms does Internet Explorer now support. One.

The fact that Microsoft is creating content creation tools that make web pages viewable only with Internet Explorer on Microsoft Windows is more of an immature act than any of the mozilla folks can come up with. The same goes for media player. If you ask me Microsoft is fishing for another Anti-trust suit and this cannot help them with the EU problem.

Re:Ordinary users don't know what web standards ar

[Prophet of Nixon]

Hmmm, I hadn't realized that it was a proprietary property. Given that, is there any equivalent standard property that I could use to check if something is loaded? Or is this a case where MS actually has a good idea and Gecko should finish their implementation, as they apparently have with normal img elements? I'm using it with an image preloader/swapper I've been messing with, to ensure that an image isn't swapped for something that isn't completely loaded. Works beautifully everywhere but on image buttons... right now I've got a nasty hack in the check that allows Firefox to swap anyway if the swapped object is an input. I think the oddest thing might be that Firefox doesn't even have an error message when the .complete check fails, as it does when I usually try to access something that doesn't exist. I'll take a look at Firebug later, since I've got to run off right now. Thanks for the help.

Media: Sickly out of control

[iabervon]

The Firefox community says plenty of stuff beyond reporting the number of downloads. The Times ad had distinct names of individuals. The Firefox page reports a bunch of important features. However, the media keeps picking up the download count. You can't really blame Mozilla for the press's focus on meaningless statistics.

Re:resort to using third-class promotional tactics

[foston]

>>>> YES! In case you haven't noticed, advertising in this day and age is mostly pandering to the lowest common denominator. The vast majority of people *love* to see "big numbers" because "well, if everyone else is doing it, I should do it too". Microsoft themselves have used the exact same tactics, as well as almost every other company on the planet at some point or another

Every major corporation uses these tactics for exactly this reason. People are followers when it comes to technology. They don't know what a good browser is if it hit them over the head with a frying pan. Whether or not they are being TOTALLY AND BRUTALLY HONEST is not the point. They are putting it in the light of marketing people who tend to "shine over" the details and focus on the fact that lots of people are using their product.

A bit too much gloss perhaps, but nothing compared to the outright lies of some vaporware that comes to mind....

Foston

Lets be constructive

[Atroxodisse]

By complaining about the fact that printing from Firefox really sucks. Someone write me up a bug report. I'm too lazy.

"Sickly Out of Control?"

[boutell]

That's not even an overstatement; it's the headline of some completely different story. "Mozilla Community: Prone to Exaggeration" maybe. But not even half as much as the troll who wrote this article.

Incomplete Downloads

[DeadboltX]

How many of those downloads were never even completed due to the user canceling the download or getting disconnected

It's a good thing

[Palmedero]

Microsoft and fanatics of the evil empire love to state that Windows is currently on 98% (or something like that) of machines worldwide. I think it's great that Firefox is doing this because it shows the world that not only is there an alternative to Internet Explorer, but that you don't have to switch your OS, deal with a hoard of non-compliance (*cough* netscape *cough*), AND it's better than IE! I can tell you that at Southern Connecticut State University, all of our computer helpdesks and support centers recommend the use of Firefox over IE.

Narrow band inside brain = slow download rate

[Anonymous Coward]

This guy is using a very narrow band artificial neuron comunication system inside his brain.

He takes 3 secs at best do double click on a desktop icon, so when he finaly could open the browser it aleredy said 150M downloads ;)

Ofcourse this number is important to achieve some audiences that are influenced by the number of other's doing the same.

Try trippple click this and mouses no longer exist :)

Wow...

[Tallz]

I wonder what brought this on? I think word of mouth and personal recommendations work just fine to promote such an excellent browser let alone any type of software. I dont see how the Firefox community has been "bashing" IE at all. From a security stand point firefox really is safer to use than IE. Thats not some biased opinion that is factual. To just come out and bash the open source community's golden egg is just wrong. Especially in a place like this. What is the internet coming to?

Must Be...

[Cryssen]

http://z.about.com/d/collectdolls/1/0/l/G/troll.jp g

So?

[RomulusNR]

Why not pump number of delivered packages? It works for McDonald's. Are they immature, or insanely successful? Or both -- and if so, then what does maturity matter?

Maturity

[RomulusNR]

After all, the people who need to download FF and TB -- namely, Microslaves who trap themselves into using IE and Outlook -- are hardly the most mature people on the Internet.

Re:resort to using third-class promotional tactics

[LaughingJack]

Indeed, the number would be incredibly high for Microsoft. But don't forget you have to download IE 6 to keep your system up to date since IE is so tightly integrated in Windows. Hell, as a user of Firefox, I have to download IE to keep XP up to date. So, at best, these numbers would be much more a lie than the numbers advertised by the Firefox Community.

OSS Immaturity....

[katorga]

Immature OSS fanboyism, and especially the anti-business rantings of RMS, have done huge damage to efforts to adopt OSS in my organization.

FWIW, I take the firefox numbers with a grain of salt. It make have 150 million downloads, but I rarely actually see anyone outside of linux users actually running it.

Re:resort to using third-class promotional tactics

[milimetric]

I don't know if at best they'd be a lie. I download firefox onto every computer I use. Library, Internet Cafes, friends' computers, my toaster, Everywhere. I don't know, I think a valuable statistic here would be how many people use firefox from different aspects of life: developers, grandmas, taxi drivers, etc. Also, an interesting thing to ask people is why they don't use Opera. I'm a convert. I used to looove firefox, but it's just not as good as Opera.

Whither Slashdot?

[Ranger]

I've been reading Slashdot for six years or so, and it seems to me, the quality of stories have really taken a nose dive.

Ditto. It's worse than that. Not only has the quality dropped, the headlines are very misleading and the scoops are confusing. Have you noticed that slashdot is lagging on posting stories. Often I'll read about what used to be a slashdot worthy story elsewhere first, hours even days before it appears on slashdot. Does slashdot have the equivalent of an undiagnosed brain tumor?

I agree

[danpsmith]

It's a meaningless statistic. With just my two computers alone I've probably downloaded firefox a dozen or more times not counting updates. Even if they take into account unique IP addresses, the same people are probably downloading at different times from different locations. An easier way to tell would be to have Google conduct a study or something. But is there really a need? We know IE takes up more market share than Firefox, by far. I would say that the best way for people to get the word out about firefox would be word of mouth. Personally, any support I do for adware I tell the user to get rid of IE and install Firefox as their default browser (with their permission of course) and nobody really seems to notice the difference, so they go with it anyway.

Re:Ordinary users don't know what web standards ar

[Expert Determination]

Any non-geek user doesn't understand what is wrong with IE. You can't verbally demonstrate what is wrong with it.

You know, if you're not able to demonstrate what's wrong with something, you really need consider, quite seriously, exactly what you mean by "wrong". Otherwise it sounds like the proverbial pink fairies that live in our garden but which always vanish whenever I try to show them to people.

Meaningless, or just imprecise?

[Kelson]

I'd say they aren't meaningless, they just don't mean what some people want them to mean.

If the numbers continue to go up at a comparable rate, and you have any indication that it's not just people upgrading or DoS bots repeatedly downloading the installers, then it indicates continued interest in the product. It means people are still trying it out. You can assume from past experience that at least some of those people will stick around.

Sure, it doesn't tell you how many people are actually using it, but the nature of the web is such that you can't count users accurately, and people will always contest your claims because the stats in their region/audience/etc. disagree. Something like "X copies were downloaded from our official mirrors" is pretty unambiguous.

IMO, as long as they're not trying to claim that the download count means something it doesn't (like users) and the numbers aren't inflated, I see no problem with it appearing in the PR.

umm...

[wingman358]

WHO CARES?! Why doesn't everyone just choose the browser they like?

Re:Ordinary users don't know what web standards ar

[Bogtha]

is there any equivalent standard property that I could use to check if something is loaded?

Add an event listener for the load event on the <input> element. This works in the latest versions of Firefox, Opera and Safari. It doesn't work in Konqueror 3.5 though, but I expect that will be rectified shortly. No idea about earlier versions, sorry. You could even emulate the Internet Explorer behaviour with something along the lines of:

if ( document.getElementById && window.addEventListener) {
document.getElementById( "myinputelement" ).addEventListener( "load", function() {
this.loaded = true;
}, false );
}

Re:resort to using third-class promotional tactics

[Kelson]

Plus there's the fact that Firefox depends almost entirely on its users for marketing. Mozilla provides ad banners of various sizes, a website to discuss marketing, and comes up with campaigns, but they don't have a full-on marketing department to do their own TV commercials, take out advertisements in magazines, etc. Instead they do fundraisers to buy an ad, or hold video contests.

The result is a strange chimera that's part low-budget advertising, part grass-roots campaign. (I wouldn't call it astroturfing, since that would mean Mozilla was mobilizing a small group to impersonate a larger group, and I see no indication of that.) On one hand, with lots of volunteers, you get people with lots of different skills -- it's very open source in that regard. But that also means you have lots of people who aren't trained in advertising, so yes, you're going to get "third-class promotional tactics."

Unfortunately, it also means you get people who prefer to engage in flame wars, or set up their website to block users of other browsers, etc. Spread Firefox actively tries to discourage these tactics, but they do happen, and I think they're more of a concern than any "controversy" over download numbers.

Are you kidding me?!?!

[devhen]

Personally I'm very interested in seeing the latest total downloads number. Why not?!?! Come on... this guy's got more time on his hands than he knows what to do with. Can you say 'over-analyzation'? (dont know if thats a word...) o.O

Um

[aukxsona]

Ok I like watching numbers...I like seeing the calories burned on the treadmill, I like seeing the times I have conversed back and forth with someone, I like seeing how much people use in terms of earths resources,I LIKE balancing my check book (and I'm poor), I like watching numbers spin. Is this immature...uh maybe...but not necessarily downing Internet Explorer...just like knowing another minion is created...lol.

It's the Murrcan ...

[Anonymous Coward]

... way (read Repugnican)

When MS stops using "Innovative"

[Herschel Cohen]

as describing their actions; sure then I agree that it would be certainly reasonable to quit the finger pointing at the inferior IE.

Until that happens, and the fanbois rage for the true one and only Microsoft, why not cite some numbers. Like much of the statistical data showing Firefox losing several tenths of points in popularity, what's the harm. Just as meaningless or probably less, because it simply a total count. Moreover, they try to not recount upgrades.

Somehow I find it hard to believe this person's concern is sincere. So go to MS and convince them to stop the crap marketing and mafia like "marketing" tactics. Then I am sure Firefox will cease citing meaningless numbers. Quid pro Quo

Re:Ordinary users don't know what web standards ar

[Kelson]

Show me a standards-compliant page that renders differently in Opera.

It all depends on which subset of the standards you use.

A while back, I ran into some bugs with :first-line in Opera 8. Fully validating code, but styles would persist incorrectly and, in one case, text would disappear. One's fixed in Opera 9 TP2, the other is still around. Sure, this was real edge-case stuff, but it happens.

Here's a more practical example going the other way: creating frames with generated content. It works handily in Opera, not at all in IE, and can be made to almost-work in Firefox (it comes down to positioning on generated content based on different versions of the CSS spec).

Standards compliance in a browser isn't a matter of working down a checklist from item #1 to item #1000, and counting complaince based on whether you get to item #800, #900, or #999. You look through the standards and prioritize. Maybe both browsers fulfill 900 of those items -- but maybe item #723 is only implemented in one of them, because one browser picked it as a priority, and the other put it off.

Stepping away from standards-compliance for a moment, you also have to take into account things like XMLHTTPRequest, contentEditable, and so on. Most rich text editors (popular in webmail apps) couldn't run on Opera until they released the Opera 9 previews, because the required features weren't there. And every minor version of Opera from 8 on has made more adjustments for AJAX apps.

Even within standards -- both de facto and de jure -- you need to find a common subset. Validating the code doesn't guarantee that other browsers will behave the way you expect.

Re:resort to using third-class promotional tactics

[curunir]

Yes, but is it necessary to constantly tout the total number of downloads as if that really means anything? Might it not be better to find some blog entry online that tries to argue that the total number of downloads might be a spurious metric of browser popularity and try to make a Slashdot story out of it? You can even include blatant propaganda like, "It's a fact that Internet Explorer is inferior to Firefox with its extensive collection of extensions and ability to support qualified web standards."

That way, hundreds of thousands of people will see it and you will have still mentioned the incredibly high number of downloads without simply sounding like a broken record. You'll have also enumerated the features of Firefox that make it most appealing to you, and you might even get that warm feeling that comes from having had something posted to Slashdot.

Now granted that most of the hundreds of thousands of people who view your advertisement will simply dismiss it as Slashdot story-spam, but some people will actually be dumb enough to reply to it. Even more amazing, some even dumber people will respond to those people (the dumbest of which will adopt a sarcastic tone and write a long, drawn-out post that could have easily have been summerized in a single sentence).

So...back to the matter at hand, wouldn't that be better than just simply announcing each new milestone in the number of Firefox downloads?

Advertising is Immature?

[MidnightBrewer]

Touting the numbers is called advertising, and it works. Why is that immature? I used to work for a boss who believed that the best way to promote our business was by just "being good." We were great, and also largely unemployed, since nobody knew we existed. No thanks.

Re:Ordinary users don't know what web standards ar

[Prophet of Nixon]

That looks like a really good idea; if the image buttons appended a new property to themselves when they loaded, then I could just check for that instead of .complete in the rollover code. I didn't even realize that properties could be appended to objects on the page, though I guess I should have suspected since I've done it with functions. I'll give that a try tonight.

Thanks!

I agree.

[Picard102]

Slashdot is proof of it.

hey...

[idlake]

The thing with these numbers is that they are misleading at best [CC], and the only thing they accomplish is immature fanboyism.

At least our immature fanboyism is superior to Apple's and Microsoft's immature fanboyism. No, wait, I take that back--that's an area in which Apple and Microsoft still have us beat.

Re:Ordinary users don't know what web standards ar

[NekoXP]

Well I don't figure there is anything particularly wrong with IE.

But from Mozilla Foundation's standpoint there "is", and that is what they are trying to put across.

I level the same criticisms of FireFox as I would with IE - it isn't as standards compliant as they say, it's certainly not "more secure" considering the number of cross-site vulnerabilities, IDN handling bugs, code/shell execution, memory corruption, buffer underruns, spoofing and so on. It doesn't block adverts by default anyway.. most sites are using BODY onClick events to pop up adverts now, rather than onLoad.

About all I use Firefox for is tabs and the keyboard shortcut to change font sizes, and that awesome "view source for selection" which really helps when developing sites. Everything else I mix and match IE with.

Not to mention....

[toadlife]

1.0, 1.01, 1.02, 1.03, 1.04, 1.05, 1.07, 1.5, 1.5.1.......

Hell yes, sghow the download count....

[3seas]

....because MS certainly using it to promote their web browser IE.

But they are more sneaky about it.

When you install IE it defaults to reloading pages from the web instead of using the same page already in the cache.

What this does is mak it look as though their browser is being used more.

Anonymous Hater Here...

[Anonymous Coward]

After reading that prepubescent dribble.... All I can say is:

Go back to surfing the pop-up palace that is the internet on your feature less, security hole ridden, Internet Explorer.

Just like me. Shitwad.

Why would the Slashdot editors post this crap in the first place? Do they WANT an evil flame war?

CMon - life in the 'net is too short to deal with this IE/Mozilla religious war.

Bottom line - IE works quickly on OLD SLOW hardware (like the 400Mhz Win98 laptop I am typing on) where Mozilla crawls.

Have a nice day - one rambling, overtired Anonymous Coward.

So...

[Dr. GeneMachine]

Who gives a rat's ass? Firefox is good - no doubt, what gives how many downloads it has?

And, well, Opera is still better....

True but obvious

[cranbers]

The person who wrote this admitted it himself that what people were doing was true, so what's the problem? Ie is a piece of crap, long outdated and should not be in the shape its in after 5 years and if it wasn't for firefox there would be no ie7 for xp. In regards to the other things I would assume the amount of downloads is usually repeat downloaders, I know when I reformat my computer and start from scratch I have redownloaded firefox at least a dozen times since it was released. So yeah odds are the results are not accurate of users, but there are a lot of them no doubt. I love firefox and I hope they continue to improve the product and get some good bug fixes and security in the next version. But please keep it light and let us, add features with the extensions features.