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Firefox Breaks 8 Million, Gets Into Guinness
Punkster812 writes "Mozilla has gotten the results back from the Guinness World Records and the official number that will be set as the record is 8,002,530 downloads. The day started out a little rough for them, with server troubles during the initial launch, but once they got everything going, they were able to transfer 62,419,734 MB in 24 hours.
You can get more information, including a breakdown of how many downloads each country did from around the world, by visiting spreadfirefox.com.
Congratulations, Mozilla, on the new record."
http://ars.userfriendly.org/cartoons/?id=20080623
If you haven't been down-modded lately, you aren't trying.
Sacred cows make the best hamburger.
It appears that this is the first recorded record by Guinness Book, so it's kind of arbitrary, however shuttling 62TB of data is pretty impressive. Now that the gauntlet has been thrown down, it'll be interesting to see if other software companies will try to compete. If nothing else, this gave Firefox some much-needed press.
My mom always said, "Jim, you're 1 in a million." Given the current population, there are 7000 of me. God help us all!
Seriously, this is a great thing. But considering that no record existed previously, it's not exactly earth-shattering. I look to see this record broken with subsequent launches, as more and more people have access to the internet, and as Mozilla gains more share. Also, 7.7 million of the total came from the US. It would be great to see a larger overseas distribution, especially considering the pledges that were signed in places like Africa.
An excellent move for Mozilla. Although I'm sure a lot of these downloads were from existent Firefox 1.5/2 users, I'm sure some of the people using Internet Explorer jumped on the FF bandwagon. Less spyware, better browsing, less bullshit. Good work.
the chairs that died to bring us this news....
Considering Internet Explorer ships with Windows and most often is forced on users with automatic updates, this is hardly surprising. At least Firefox users choose to download it. (And yes, I know you can turn auto updates off).
Funny... nobody from North Korea downloaded Firefox 3.
I wonder how downloads Windows Update gets every patch Tuesday? Automated downloads, but downloads none the less.
http://xkcd.com/198/
Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government.
Its amazing that over 300k people downloaded firefox from russia, despite the fact that in soviet russia, firefox downloads you. /groan
"Give someone a program, frustrate them for a day... Teach someone to program, frustrate them for a lifetime."
Amazingly Iran has far more download than Saudi. No wonder being an US ally sucks.
yea but seriously, what does this number even mean??
I doubt exactly, 8,002,530 people installed it and are using it. You know there were plenty of anti-microsoft nerds who downloaded it 50 times each.
We might as well just stick to bandwidth measurements, in which case YouTube would smash the above record.
I'm happy FF 3.0 is out and all, but I don't really see the big deal in this number.
Imagine what preloading FireFox could do to the brand-differentiation of Dell or HP. Why do they not try this obvious move but insist on fighting on price? What really is in the undisclosed agreements between the big name PC vendors and MSFT? What it would take for them to break out?
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Someone make a map like that but base it on percentage of population.
Pre-built binaries are for wussies — real women and men build from source.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Russia's huge!
I was referring to Internet Explorer 7 on Windows XP, which is pushing as an automatic update now if I'm not mistaken.
With their main industries being fishing, gold mining and timber they are unable to build a castle and advance to the internet age, hence their zero d/l stats.
That the actual end users explicitly seek out a piece of software, rather than settle for a defacto standard. Having users because they are too lazy to replace what the OEM gave them is, in my opinion, not as impressive.
As to the OEMs, there is the possibility of a kickback from MS from using IE exclusively, just like other 'free software', but I would think that would perhaps be too brazen considering the whole anti-trust thing.
Another possibility is a deep seated fear of distributing open-source software that seems to pervade these companies. Dell at least should be over it since it ships linux pre-installed, but then again, lawyers can insist that though the codebase is the same, they need to be paid to review different uses of it.
And finally, there is the possibility they believe it really not worth their time to bother. Would you *honestly* choose one brand over another *just* because of firefox being pre-installed, even if the firefox one is more expensive? It would take some work to migrate their crapware platform to make sure things work with firefox that would cost more than zero dollars. Meanwhile, the customers probably aren't looking for that explicitly, since they by and large can just download it truly for free themselves. Pre-install of linux is one thing, it gives an assurance about the hardware choices with respect to linux drivers, but Firefox is just a browser.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
If people are still using Internet Explorer, it can only be explained as ignorance or complacency.
Or personal preference. I downloaded Firefox about a year ago, tried it alongside IE for several weeks, determined there were parts I liked, parts I didn't, and ultimately made the decision that I preferred IE. It's nice to have a choice, and I have made my pick. Others picked something else, whether it be Firefox, Opera, or something entirely different. Fine. Good for them. I don't care because I have my browsing experience the way I want it and that's all I really care about.
If Firefox works for you, hurrah. I'm not so smug and condescending that I'm going to start calling you names. Just let me have what I prefer and we're all happy. I don't care if you think I made a poor or even stupid decision, in much the same way as I don't care if a Honda driver thinks I shouldn't be driving a Toyota. Isn't that the whole point: for people to have choices and be able to choose what they prefer?
And it is not just that the Firefox programmers are brilliant and creative.
In its own way one should acknowledge the strategic brilliance of the way the record was planned. By being US centric (as in, failing to recognise that there is something like human beings abroad), the 24 hour period was set to start such that people in countries like NZ, AU and JP were frustrated in not seeing the new version when the due date arrived, (or downloaded old stuff, ha ha). For those who waited, they were joined by hoards of Europeans and Brits (I'm sure they appreciate this gesture) who had to wait until the evening before they could join the Americans to swamp the servers. Those Europeans who gave up before local 12 PM and didn't realise that they could still help to set the record by downloading it in the morning, also failed to add to the number of copies downloaded. So, in short, the Mozilla organisation has made it easy for themselves to beat their own record, provided they are brilliant enough to recognise the rude brilliance of the first record attempt.
Bert
there were some evil companies packaged their evil extensions (addons?) with firefox and tricked people to download in China some time ago. So the brand name of Firefox is not so good in China.
There is a spark in every single flame bait point.
The SpearFirefox FAQ clearly states that the download count does not include duplicate downloads, incomplete downloads or downloads done through Firefox updates.
I would've liked to see stats per operating system too.
FireFox stagged a publicity stunt and a bunch of anti-ms fanboys ate it up like candy.
First, FireFox asked/begged people to all download on a particular day to break this record. I've never been 'asked' to download any other piece of software on a particular day to break any record.
Second, what was the existing record? *GASP* you don't mean to tell me there *wasn't* an existing record? Well then....that's not really all that impressive - is it? WoW supposedly has 9 million users, and come patch day they'd all be glad to download files much larger than FF3....oh but that doesn't count because it's a patch? Gotcha.
So umm, basically, FireFox made up some very specific rules so that they could break a record held by nobody so they can get their name in the paper for something that will say, 'FireFox most downloaded browser ever!' or something.
Besides which, who exactly was counting the 8 million downloads?
Nothing to see here, just marketing hype.