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Only 25% of Firefox Downloaders Are 'Active Users'
bheer writes "The Guardian points out a page on the Mozilla wiki noting that 'only 50% of the people downloading Firefox actually try it out, and only a further half of those continue to use it actively.' ZDNet has some commentary on the browser's retention rate. While a 25% retention rate isn't necessarily bad, Mozilla is trying to improve these figures with a 12 point plan that includes more TV and media advertising, a better start page and several installation tweaks."
Why bother downloading it if you aren't going to try it? Is this a common thing? I can only recall maybe a couple of things in my entire life I've downloaded and not checked out.
I use Firefox as my main browser, but I've downloaded it many times to different PC's (which I may use only occasionally). I wonder how this affects their numbers.
What about the times that people download it once (IT shops) and install it on hundreds of computers(ok not always that many, but enough to mess up these stats)
Think about what the internet was like in 2002, when Mozilla 1.0 was first released. We encountered IE-only sites daily, Safari didn't exist, and MSIE definitively dominated the web landscape. Anyone complaining to a bank or power company about a Mozilla problem just claimed to be using Netscape -- the Gecko browser people had actually heard of -- and rarely got anywhere. Those of us using Mozilla preferred it for a variety of reasons, and hoped for wider adoption so that our preferred browser would receive acceptable support from webmasters.
Today, Firefox is a decidedly mainstream browser, listed on most "supported browser" lists, and Firefox-only sites are about as common now as the remaining IE-only sites. Do we need more adoption? If Firefox is serving its existing users well, is it worth the cost of an advertising blitz to capture a few more?
Well, maybe if they allowed one to install FF without having being an admin and without having to download some 20 plugins each time to just get the basic functionality of a default Opera install...
Obama likes poor people so much, he wants to make more of them.
The typical Windows user is logged on as an Administrator, out of the box. Therefore the typical Windows user will never see this issue, nor need to work around it.
Those who don't login as an administrator either know what they're doing (and therefore have the skills to understand the problem), or they're a large enough business that their IT department should be familiar with problems like this. Firefox is hardly the only program that expects to be able to write to it's program directory, which isn't allowed by normal users.
Now, logically, since you are a technical user, and set your primary account as a normal user, you should know that normal users can't write to %ProgramFiles%. Therefore when you attempt to run an update, that you know damn well requires writing files out to %ProgramFiles%, you shouldn't be surprised to see problems or errors.
Instead of giving your normal user account full access to the program directory, you should maintain security and install updates after logging in as an administrator. The normal user can see when an update is available, which gives you the push to login as an administrator and install it, but obviously the normal user shouldn't be able to do it.
That everyone pointed to every other problem under the sun instead of this illustrates the overwhelming number of Windows users who run as administrator. I've got a couple dozen programs installed that refuse to run if the logged in account isn't an administrator. At least Firefox manages functions just fine for everything except program updates.