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Firefox Reaches 10 Million Downloads
Posted by
timothy
on Sat Dec 11, 2004 08:54 PM
from the conflagration dept.
from the conflagration dept.
Samhain138 writes "It seems like Firefox has finally reached 10 million downloads, just a bit over a month after Firefox 1.0 was released. Congratulations!" My favorite extensions (not all of which worked when 1.0 first came out) are all working happily now, too; the latest nightly has been working flawlessly for me all of today.
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Taking it back (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Taking it back (Score:5, Interesting)
No, the work's not over yet, and I think it's time to focus attention on Thunderbird, because Outlook Express is also a security risk. Just replacing IE on a machine won't be enough, in my opinion.
Now, I've not had as good an experience with Thunderbird as with Firefox, so that's a problem. Large message databases that open very quickly with OE take on the order of 10-15 seconds with Thunderbird 1.0, which is a significant difference. That could give newbies a bad impression of TB, even though feature-wise it's way ahead of OE.
EricJavaScript is not Java [ericgiguere.com]
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Re:Taking it back (Score:4, Interesting)
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Re:Taking it back (Score:4, Insightful)
With a DB you have fast access, and compression capabilities, but its no longer human readable.
Even if you index and mbox i think you are still going to get a lag reading a large text file.
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Great! (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Great! (Score:4, Interesting)
Everyone did. My site is as far from a tech-oriented site, and from the past few months of observation, Firefox has increase from ~9% of total visitor browser usage to the current 25+%.
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Does MS care? (Score:3, Interesting)
Other then ASP.Net's smart navigation feature, MS would lose very little if everybody switched to Firefox.
Re:Does MS care? (Score:3)
But those hardcore techs(XUL, XPCOM, etc... for Moz, and the ones you mentioned for IE) just rock for dev
Rollover (Score:4, Funny)
It's just funny to me... (Score:5, Funny)
how something that used to have updates every three to four months now causes people to wet their pants like this: "the latest nightly has been working flawlessly for me all of today."
I mean, don't you all have something serious to occupy your time with? Like Half-Life 2 patches? Or writing the walkthrough?
Or, something?
Re:It's just funny to me... (Score:3, Informative)
Also, there's an implied "and counting" there since it would be a little hard for the latest nightly to have been running for much longer than a day.
Re:It's just funny to me... (Score:4, Interesting)
no, AC, it's not a "pure troll" - I don't do "pure troll." I might, at times, speak some vague dialect of troll. But this was not one of those times.
I was being serious.
Ten million downloads is impressive. And it is nice to think that people might finally be looking at non-Microsoft ways of using the Web and Net. That's wonderful. But shit, it's been over three years since I was using Nightly Builds of anything. If shit ain't working by now...it probably isn't worth working on.
Ah, now that was a wee bit offsides, now wasn't it? A bit trollish?
Still, the more trollish posts are the "none of this matters! IE still 0wnZ the m0z!" Go flame them, Cowboy. And maybe even put some of your precious Karma at risk to do it.
My post is based on ten years worth of waiting on Netscape updates. I remember being excited by 2.0. Those were the days. This is just candy for hyperactive neo-nerds of the new century. Fuck 'em. Call me at the major release dates and don't give me a shitty product, ok?
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its nice... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:its nice... (Score:3, Interesting)
IE IS DEAD! (Score:5, Funny)
Re:IE IS DEAD! (Score:5, Insightful)
Total time to develop website - 1 week. Total time to hack the CSS/HTML about to get it working in at least a reasonable number of IE varients - five weeks and counting... Seeing Firefox stomp on IE's marketshare - priceless! To develop a standards compliant website, there's open source, for anything else there's Microsoft...
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Re:IE IS DEAD! (Score:3, Insightful)
Provided that you only use those bits of CSS that IE actually does right, which is a fair amount to be fair, then it probably is. The same holds true for all the other rendering engines of course, each has their own quirks and issues, but at least they are getting stomped on with each successive release. Unless Microsoft changes its plans again (very possible) we're not likely to see much improvement
well the statistics are flawed (Score:5, Funny)
Re:well the statistics are flawed (Score:5, Insightful)
Even so, I'd say it's pretty certain that the total number of people using Firefox v1.0 on a regular basis is *much* higher than 10m, and still growing...
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Including... (Score:3, Informative)
Three copies for me, one for each of my systems. Unfortunately still have to use IE at work, but working on that. :(.
Before Firefox, I would routinely, between Ad-Aware and Spybot, be cleaning up 50-100 spyware/adware infections a week between the machines. (This was with IE set to high security.) After switching to Firefox, the highest weekly total (between all the systems) has been five.
Firefox typically opens within a couple seconds of clicking whatever needs to use it. I routinely had IE take half a minute. If I needed any proof that Firefox is a superior, faster, more secure browser, this has certainly been it. I'll never use IE again.
Re:Including... (Score:5, Informative)
Ok, I use Firefox as my main browser on Windows, OSX and Linux. I rarely use IE on Windows for any reason any more, BUT it launches instantly when I do use it. This is much faster than Firefox, and understandable since much of it is already loaded after bootup. If you really were waiting for 30 seconds for IE to come up, then something is seriously screwed up on your system...
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SessionSaver (Score:4, Interesting)
Downloads of what? (Score:3, Interesting)
what still is buggy (in Mac version)... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:what still is buggy (in Mac version)... (Score:3, Interesting)
Meanwhile at W3schools, things are moving... fast (Score:5, Informative)
See their statistics here [w3schools.com].
They include the December statistics, and it has already increased more than in the past month, and it's still only 12th of December...
It's interesting to compare to the usage in e.g. January 2004.
Of course, W3Schools is a web site not really representing the Internet population at large, but it is a community that consists of a whole lot of web masters teaching themselves to code for the web we'll see tomorrow. I hope these are signs of what to come and we'll have less incompatible web sites in the future.
2004 has truly been a year the Mozilla Foundation has been doing great, and it will be very interesting to see what will happen in 2005!
Re:Meanwhile at W3schools, things are moving... fa (Score:3, Interesting)
OK, I'm bored and have a spreadsheet to hand, so I've dropped the data into a spreadsheet, generated a graph and added an exponential trendline to Mozilla. It tracks the recorded data quite nicely from January 2002 through to July 2004 at which point the recorded data actually starts to climb increasingly *above* the curve. Assuming that the current momentum is maintained, the trend line shows Mozilla passing 50% of total browser share aroun
Re:Meanwhile at W3schools, things are moving... fa (Score:3, Insightful)
MS has given up on IE. Someone is going to come up with the killer extension to Firefox and then it will gain even more momentum. Tabbed windows was a great start. At first I thought it was a stupid idea, and then I tried it and realized how wrong I was. IE hasn't
Whoops that was me (Score:5, Funny)
I've been trying to download it on a crappy dialup connection. Sorry, sorry.
Some Perspective (Score:5, Interesting)
Google Suggest (Score:5, Informative)
http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?t=182
i see some problems with it but it has potential..
Firefox is great! (Score:3, Informative)
I really wish that the Extension Room [mozdev.org] was more carefully maintained though. As an example, I looked at the RSS extensions recently, and found that 2 out of 3 did not work. One was even version 0.0.1! With extensions that can't install, or even worse, cause problems, it really tarnishes the quality of the work that went into Firefox itself.
Nightlies are currently unstable (Score:4, Informative)
Where can I get a Glibc 2.2 Build? (Score:3, Insightful)
As a side note, I find it pretty annoying that I'm getting left behind with my RH 7.3 system. I was getting by ok building
Re:Where can I get a Glibc 2.2 Build? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Where can I get a Glibc 2.2 Build? (Score:3, Informative)
Since gnu c/C++ did not do this that well until recently, all unix programs typically static link to a library or dependancy.
Change a library or version and BAM! Signal 11 error or some other message appears about a missing dependancy.
The key is to include the old libraries and programs and have the kernel link it to the correct ones at compile time.
This is how Solaris and the BSD's to a limited extence work. They just use
porn - why firefox will take market share (Score:5, Funny)
But where it really shines is for surfing porn (or so I'm told). None of those dang active-x controls, and it handles the pop-ups better.
don't forget why VHS won over Beta...
Keep discovering new great things about Firefox (Score:5, Informative)
Open in Tabs. Make a bookmark folder of the websites you want to be open when you sit down and start browsing. When opening that folder the Bookmarks menu, use the last entry -- "Open In Tabs" -- and go get your coffee. When you come back, the browser is ready: All the sites are nicley pre-loaded in tabs.
RSS Feeds. If you haven't tried this yet, do yourself a favour and do so. For those clueless people like me, what you do is click the little RSS button on the bottom right of the browser, which creates a new bookmark folder. Inside that folder, the links to the stories of the day are created automatically for that site.
Yeah, I know, you've been doing this for ever, what's next, Nice2Cats will discover these things called fax machines. But for slow people like me, this is just awesome. Combine this with the adblock extension, and there is no way in hell IE can compete anymore.
Firefox still has one major issue (Score:5, Interesting)
Don't get me wrong, I love my firefox but it's annoying as hell to constantly find out that the reason my computer has been running so slow for the past 5 minutes or the reason this game i launched is giving me 10 fps is because firefox did it again (and again, and again...like the duracell rabbit)
I'm not the only one complaining about this and I 'm still waiting for a fix. (amd64 3200+, 1 gb ram)
Re:Not there yet... (Score:5, Informative)
Well, mileage may vary. In contrast, my non-geek website is showing IE's share down to about 85%, with Firefox up to 5.7% and Mozilla up to 3%. We get about 60,000 unique visitors a month, so I feel comfortable in using the log benchmarks (AWStats) as at least a semi-definitive source when I look at the browser stats these days. It's enough traffic to provide a significant data set.
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Re:Not there yet... (Score:3, Informative)
Indeed. Looking at the stats for Stuff.co.nz [stuff.co.nz] - one of New Zealand's largest news sites - I see Firefox currently at around 8-9% and the total for all of Mozilla at around 13-14%. That's on traffic of around 7-8 million hits per day.
Not a geek site this one - Linux usage is around 1%.
Re:New York Times Advertisement? (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:New York Times Advertisement? (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:New York Times Advertisement? (Score:3, Funny)
Dunno, but are you sure that's hyphenated?
Re:New York Times Advertisement? (Score:5, Funny)
loves
should want
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Re:I'm stuck on Bio Chem - Help me geeks! (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:I'm stuck on Bio Chem - Help me geeks! (Score:5, Informative)
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Re: 10 million enlightened folks (Score:5, Insightful)
No you don't. You need to keep up with this momentum to make Firefox a standard browser.
Make anything the one and only standard, and you're back to a monoculture, with all the potential problems that embodies. (Yes, I know that Firefox would by its nature be a much more benign monoculture, but that wouldn't prevent those problems.)
Firefox is a great app, and I'm very pleased for its success, but it's not The One True Browser. Instead, it's the browser that's good enough to show that there's a whole family of True Browsers, and that once people start coding to standards we all benefit, whether we user Firefox, Camino, Safari, Opera, Konqueror, OmniWeb, Lynx, or whatever.
Please don't get all arrogant and monopolistic now!
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Re:3 copies here (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Is Firefox all that good? (Score:3, Interesting)
However, the person was experiencing major slowdown to the point of hangs with firefox killed. If he really killed firefox, then how is it a problem with firefox, unless he runs a crappy OS, such as win9x.
Besides, as for your bug, this is what is really driving me to find a smaller browser on my laptop:
220 MB and and high seek time, low transfer r