Firefox Reaches 10 Million Downloads

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.

Adblock

[Anonymous Coward]

Adblock is simply the best extension. Get rid of flash ads etc. http://adblock.mozdev.org/ [mozdev.org]

Including...

[laughingcoyote]

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:New York Times Advertisement?

[DarthMAD]

Apparently, it was delayed because they were changing it and adding much more of something (signatures or something I believe) than originally planned. Still, it probably won't be more than a few months away at most. Honestly though, this is just to flaunt it in Microsoft's face. I doubt that many people will be convinced to get Firefox from an ad in the Times, but it certainly won't hurt.

Re:Not there yet...

[Hamstaus]

my non-geek website is still showing 2% of firefox users

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.

Meanwhile at W3schools, things are moving... fast

[Jugalator]

Firefox is not only still increasing in usage, but has been accelerating this entire year.

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!

Google Suggest

[Anonymous Coward]

Speaking of firefox. They already have an extension for google suggest Check it out:

http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?t=1821 86 [mozillazine.org]

i see some problems with it but it has potential..

Re:I'm stuck on Bio Chem - Help me geeks!

[echocharlie]

This is an in-joke from another Slashdot article [slashdot.org]. It's funny once you get the context.

Re:Great!

[Anonymous Coward]

Err, Safari is (AFAIK) KHTML, not Gecko. Camino is the Gecko Mac-native browser. (Apparently 0.8.2 was out recently.)

Re:Great!

[Joe Tie.]

Right, I also use Safari, which is a Gecko browser.

Safari uses a tweaked version of the rendering engine from konqueror, not gecko.

Firefox is great!

[zippity8]

Although I personally am responsible for about 10 of those downloads - a claim that I'm sure that most slashdotters can share.

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.

Re:Great!

[liangzai]

And KTHML is of course an independent piece of work by the great folks at KDE. I guess that is why the Safari user agent string is:

Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/XX (KHTML, like Gecko) Safari/YY

Re:Including...

[FyRE666]

Firefox typically opens within a couple seconds of clicking whatever needs to use it. I routinely had IE take half a minute.

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...

Nightlies are currently unstable

[GarfBond]

Nightly builds are currently suffering from some instability after the recent branch merge (lots of features only lived on the branch until now, and only recently became available on the trunk, like extension/theme manager and find bar). If you're a happy 1.0.0 user, it might be advisable to stick with that for a while until the nightlies stabalize a bit more. A list of important bugs and fixes can be found here [nyud.net]

Re:its nice...

[Captain DaFt]

One problem I've found that'll crash Firefox is a bad Java install. Try uninstalling Java and re-install it.
Preferably with the latest version: jre-1_5_0-windows-i586.exe.

Geez, I seem to know a lot of ways things screw up, Maybe I should just admit I'm a klutz! };-)

Keep discovering new great things about Firefox

[Nice2Cats]

I probably am the last person here to figure this out, but in the last two weeks, I have grown to love two features of Firefox I wasn't aware of before:

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.

Re:Not there yet...

[Karora]

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:Not there yet...

[Anonymous Coward]

From a porn site (a very non geeky one!), the last 400000 lines of a logfile (couple of hours worth), 53468 of those lines came from a Gecko based browser, according to the agent.

Re:Where can I get a Glibc 2.2 Build?

[Billly Gates]

THe key is dynamic linking on exection and compiling time.

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 /compat directories for the linking.

I wish Linux had this or if programers were not lazy and depend on exact versions of libraries and programs that are only on their own machines.

Re:It's just funny to me...

[Hooded One]

Because the nightlies have recently been a tad fucked up due to merging the Aviary branch back into the trunk.

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:Taking it back

[digismack]

Mozilla Sunbird could use some work too. The printing feature still crashes the program even.

Does anyone know if you can apply to assist Mozilla projects for simply giving feature ideas?

Re:Not there yet...

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm seeing firefox/mozilla combined at 11%.

This is from a few hundred sites that get 10s of millions of uniques a month (major media company)

Re:Powerslug!

[the-edmeister]

For repackaged version for Firefox 1.0

http://www.extensionsmirror.nl/index.php?showtop ic =190

Re:Adobe Acrobat

[Captain DaFt]

Adobe Acrobat's little "extras" mess up more than just Firefox.
Try Adobe Reader SpeedUp, available at http://www.tnk-bootblock.co.uk/prods/misc/ .
It turns off a lot of the unwanted cruft in Acrobat and really speeds it up.
Before I ran it, if Acrobat was active, Firefox would crash when I tried to close it. Since I ran it, no prob!

Re:Firefox still needs work.

[mrchaotica]

iexplore.exe is just a stub. The majority of the code is in a .dll file (whose name escapes me at the moment) that is loaded by explorer.exe (i.e., the shell itself). So the fact that iexplore.exe means nothing.

Re:Great!

[m50d]

Yes, it is. The Mozilla and gecko bits are simply to indicate that it's *compatiable*.

Or do you think IE must be copied from netscape since it's UA is "Mozilla/4.0 (compatiable...)"

Re:Firefox still has one major issue

[neverbeeninariot]

There was a bug in Mozilla that caused very high (~99%) cpu usage when multiple tabs simultaneously used the flash plugin. While I can't say for sure that it's the same bug, I was having a similar problem with Firefox 1.0, although it didn't show up as often as with Mozilla.

Anyhow, the problem disappeared after I installed Flashblock [mozdev.org]. You might want to give it a try.

I am still having occasional lockups with the Acrobat6 pdf plugin, though. :-(

Re:Great!

[tdemark]

I like Safari as much as the next guy, but I've started to find myself using Firefox G5 [beatnikpad.com] more and more. It's a G5-optimized version of Firefox. (There's also a G4 version [mozillazine.org] for more recent G4s)

Frankly, it's a lot faster than Safari and does its thing with less processor load. Every time I use Safari to go to an SSL page or a page with heavy javascript my processor fans ramp up from 300/300 rpm to 2000/1000 rpm. The same pages with FFG5 (or even just FF) do not cause the fan speeds to change at all.

This really wouldn't be noteworthy if Safari was using that extra power to be speedy, but it is much, much slower than FF (especially on such pages).

Re:Taking it back

[mattyrobinson69]

pan, probably (it comes with most distrobutions, or you can apt-get or emerge it if your using debian or gentoo)

Re:Firefox still has one major issue

[Bagels]

I seem to have this problem whenever I wake the machine back up from sleep mode. It's kind of obnoxious - I can type something, leave for a minute, come back, and it'll just be finishing *displaying* what I typed in.

Re:Taking it back

[mattyrobinson69]

Well here's a list of clients for you to try (theyre not all clients), but you could read up on each one.

# ls /usr/portage/net-news
blam brag eventwatcher gnewspost klibido leafnode nget nzbget slrn sn tin xrn yydecode
bnr2 erss glitter inn knews newspost nntpswitch pan slrnconf suck ubh yencode

Re:Not always

[Spliffster]

i recommend to never use the notation document.elementName.property because objects may get mixed up.

what happens, if someone uses (silly yes, but we are talking about sloppy coders):

<div id="myElement"> ... yada yada yada ... <form name="myElement">...</form></div>

now which object does a sloppy coder get with: document.myElement.prop or even document.all.myElement.prop? i don't know, i have never tried it. but it will defenately screw up your code.

use document.getElementById() whenever you can (this is implemented in IE5).

Cheers, -S