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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.
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
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.