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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?"
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.
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.
Mods: Do you disagree with me? Go ahead and mod me down. Meta-mods will sort it out. Good luck!
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.
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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.
Do you really think that isn't misleading? That it doesn't make the average person think that there are 100 million users?
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?
Bogtha Bogtha Bogtha
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.
/.'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.
Well, I can't comment on the article itself - since it has been
I mod down so you can mod up. Your welcome.
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.
Professional Politicians are not the solution, they ARE the problem.
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
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.
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 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.
Bogtha Bogtha Bogtha
Before you quote Socractes and JTB, read Gettier's response to it. Give you some persepective on the problems of JTB and epistemology.