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Firefox 2 Downloads Top 2 million in 24 Hours
linuxci writes "Firefox 2.0 has had over two million downloads in 24 hours with a peak rate of over 30 downloads a second. This means Firefox is well on track to beat IE7's three million in four days. Of course stats don't equal users but it's interesting to see that the demand for Firefox is currently outstripping IE."
I downloaded IE7 on one of my school's computers. It took a little while to download, took a long time to install, required a reboot of the computer, and I've used it twice so far. To be fair, I wasn't an IE user before IE7 and don't have a lot of interest in using it now. I downloaded it out of curiosity.
I downloaded Firefox 2.0 on two machines at home and eighteen machines at work. It downloaded very quickly, installed even faster, and did not require a reboot. It also installed over my old version, asked if I wanted to check for updates to extensions, and moved all my bookmarks over. (IE7 might have done this too, but I didn't check.)
All in all, Firefox is easier, has a cleaner layout, and just plain works. Way to go Firefox. What a great program.
Yeah, I'm as old as my UID would suggest.
Everyone should know by now that extensions often take a few weeks to get updated. The extension mechanism can be annoying when there's a major update but it's like that so that extension authors are encouraged to test their extensions with new versions.
Most people actually use Firefox without extensions and by default it's a lot more featureful than IE6 and about as featureful as IE7 some people say too much was put in 2.0. You can't please everybody so instead of putting everything under the sun like Seamonkey (the Mozilla suite) or Opera they've decided on the options that are of most use to the most people and allowed others to add the extra features.
Also worth noting is that bugfix support for 1.5 will continue for a while so you can keep using it to wait for all your extensions to be compatible with the new version.
Also, there's choice in the market if Firefox is not for you. I personally prefer Firefox to Opera, but Opera is a good browser and it's worth trying it may suit your needs better.
It's funny about who is changing what here. I generally keep IE as the default browser because I get email with links for some admin tasks (approvals) that only work in IE. My main browser is FF, but I want these links to work right so IE stays the "default". However, installing FF 2.0 changed the default to FF without bothering to ask first! That was not appreciated at all. I repeated the install on another machine and it did the same. I did not see anywhere where it asked "would you like to make Firefox your default browser (recommended)". LAME. I like the browser, but that is reprehensible behavior.