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.

its nice...

[LilGuy]

but i've had a few complaints... one being it crashes a whole lot more than ie does, two it takes a bit longer to get it to start up for the first time - not a big deal, but a little annoying, and three embedded windows media files won't seem to play at all.

SessionSaver

[IO ERROR]

And the most useful extension, SessionSaver, still isn't available for 1.0. The old version, if you can still find it, mostly works okay though. A site to grab it from is here [pikey.me.uk]. I hear a rumor that there's a SessionSaverPlus in the works which will fully work with 1.0, but I haven't seen any code yet. Any news on this?

Downloads of what?

[X0563511]

In total? Im sure a good portion of those are redownloads. Lost backups, reformats, new versions released. Unless this is only counting the download of Firefox 1.0 What about mirrored downloads though? Im sure there are other places to download it, besides the mozilla website.

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

[mat catastrophe]

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?

Some Perspective

[FlipmodePlaya]

Sourceforge's Top Downloads [sourceforge.net] eMule, the top project, has 80 million downloads. Gaim, for all its awesomeness, has about 5 million. I'm not farmiliar with how they track these statistics, but I assume that is for all versions over its entire lifetime. As with the FF downloads, this is easily skewed by people downloading it more than once, or from a different source.

Re:Taking it back

[Eric Giguere]

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.

Eric
JavaScript is not Java [ericgiguere.com]

Re:Great!

[kai.chan]

Now either Microsoft attempts to get their act together or everyone (myself included) will just go for Firefox.

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+%.

Re:Meanwhile at W3schools, things are moving... fa

[Zocalo]

...it will be very interesting to see what will happen in 2005

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 around July 2006, but taking the post-1.0 surge into account it could be as soon as September 2005!

Does MS care?

[ClosedSource]

Remember the days of the browser wars when so many people warned that if IE became the dominant browser MS would take over the Internet. Well it did and they didn't.

Other then ASP.Net's smart navigation feature, MS would lose very little if everybody switched to Firefox.

I fixed the Internet for you ....

[minairia]

I'm always asked to help clean up friends computers, get rid of spyware, adware, etc. What I always do is download Firefox (along with Adblocker) and then go through the whole system and change all of the Firefox icons to IE icons. (I also set them up with a good filter for Adblocker) The real IE shortcut I dump in the trash and delete. I then tell my non-tech friends that "I fixed the internet" so that they won't see ads, won't get popups and will be much more protected against spyware. If I feel someone might actually understand what I did, I tell them. Always, a few days later, I get e-mails, calls, etc. about how great the "Internet" is working and more referrals to fix on other folks PCs. Of course, sadly, IE still lurks behind every open window, so it can't be gotten rid of completely.

Re:Taking it back

[nolife]

I have been using Thunderbird since about 0.4. It is my primary email and non binary usenet reader application and has been since I first started using it. At home, all of my accounts are IMAP and although I have some very large folders, it works very good and no difference in speed from OE, Eudora and several other IMAP capable readers I've used. At work I use on my Linux desktop to connect to our Exchange server via IMAP and it does seem to take a little long to open large folders (more then 1000 mails and some up to several 1000) that have not been accessed for a long time. Of course, I do not have an option to compare that exact setup to OE.

Re:Is Firefox all that good?

[NotoriousQ]

Not the same issue as the person's who I am responding to. This bug is basically all about firefox getting paged out to disk, which will cause slow waking time.

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 rate IDE disk. Startup time is around 20-30 seconds, goes decently fast after that as long as the machine is not constantly paging.

The best solution for me is to find a faster browser (possibly opera), or get used to lynx.

Since the author mentioned extensions

[ESqVIP]

I wonder what happened to language packs... they used to appear in the Firefox Update window. Now, AFAIK, you can't have more than one language pack (the one that comes with your download) installed.

I'm guessing it's because there's no official way to switch language packs (though there's an extension), but could anybody confirm this?

Re:its nice...

[bunratty]

I don't believe I've ever seen IE itself crash. But when I was using Windows 2000 beta with IE 5.0, crashes were frequent. As soon as I upgraded to IE 5.5, crashes almost vanished. Remember, IE is part of the operating system on Windows, so any crash you experience might be an IE crash whether you realize it or not. And when Firefox crashes, it doesn't tend to take the whole OS down with it.

Re:what still is buggy (in Mac version)...

[toddestan]

I don't get why FireFox even bothers messing with the pdf plugin. The damn plugin doesn't even work reliably with IE. They should do what Opera does and just hand over the pdf file to the OS so it can launch Acrobat Reader (or Ghostview, or whatever you got installed).

Disable IE with a fake proxy

[Anonymous Coward]

Set your IE proxy to 127.0.0.1:1, no proxy for 127.0.0.1. Then even if IE (MSHTML) runs, it won't be able to access anywhere but the local machine. Firefox won't be affected.

rss feeds

[spead]

I love the fact that firefox offers live bookmarks but I haven't found many websites that offer the options. Do you know of any new websites offering live bookmarks.

Firefox still has one major issue

[__aailob1448]

The infamous 100% cpu usage bug. It has been present at least since 0.9 and occurs frequently and seemingly at random though usually it's when it's "loading" a page. It gets stuck and usually, closing the tab is not enough and i have to restart the browser.

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:Taking it back

[Anonymous Coward]

A bunch of geeks with a "hate MS" attitude saying something doesn't make it so.

Everyone is entitled to their own opinion. Some people like to push an agenda based on past experience or knowledge of an event. If you really do not follow MS security issues or know of any current or past exploits for Outlook/OE/IE which are all VERY closely tied together and to the base OS of Windows itself, I would suggest you do some Google searching before blindly passing off the rants as baseless. See past the agenda pushing and investigate yourself. There are holes and have been many holes (often times, IE security issues are also OE/Outlook issues as they share the same rendering engine and both use the IE security zones for operation).

Search Google for Outlook security holes.
Another place to look is the NTBUGTRAQ mailing list, here [ntbugtraq.com] is a search for Outlook from 1/2003 to current (the link is not inclusive or all specific to the Outlook or OE clients, but will provide some history if you are interested). Again, you can use whatever client you want but do not assume that because you do not know of any holes that they do not exist.

Re:Does MS care?

[driptray]

...MS would lose very little if everybody switched to Firefox.

MS could potentially lose everything.

Firefox (gecko) is an OS-independent platform for application development. We're already seeing some fairly sophisticated apps being developed using the browser as the platform (Gmail and Flickr for example), and that trend will take off if Firefox (and technology like Xforms) reaches critical mass. Microsoft could find themselves in a situation where almost all new software development for the desktop is being done for a platform that they don't control.

This would make Windows irrelevant. And once that happens, Microsoft's lever on the rest of the software industry is gone.

Ditto.

[bs_02_06_02]

I've got several windoze machines, 2 of which have not been "re-installed" in quite some time, and both load IE almost instantly, whereas Firefox is a slow boat to... I'm curious why... but the more I use Firefox, the more I don't care.

Does Firefox have a serious security problem?

[weedenbc]

This guy on one of my mailing lists claims Firefox has a huge security hole as compared to IE. His post:

After using Firefox far more aggressively I am a pleased to say it does quite a bit. Very nice plugin support and very nice extensions for web developers. Also, because it does not support active X at all, it has a decent layer of security.

However, it has some very serious drawbacks. Firefox claims it is using a cutting edge framework and avoided the "per process" feature that IE has. This means IE lets me spawn a new IE process on demand if I wanted to. This has a lot of pros, including - security from cross-site scripting attacks, if you auth into one site, the other can never see your session cookies - isolation from crashing, one bad IE can only kill it's children, if you spawn a new instance on demand you restrict your damage - shut down plugins on demand to keep things very light, if my new IE spawn uses Java, I can kill that and still keep my existing IE windows. - lets me login to the same website multiple times with different credentials, this is handy for web devs and power users.

Unfortunately, the Mozilla framework, in their infinite wisdom decided not to support "per process" or even make it an option. A big surprise coming from people who planned on allowing extensions.

So now if someone does trick me into opening a URL and knows my web site habits, I will be vulnerable to a cross-site scripting attack. Of course, the Mozilla developers vehemently deny this, yet this is an ancient Bugtraq CSS attack technique that has been around for years.

They claim it's not common, is that why a "tiny" army of people have already complained?

They claim IE's way is not intuitive, could have fooled me. I can launch multiple spawns in about 1-2 seconds thanks to the way IE defaults to new spawn process via shortcut.

They claim it's secure. That's why kiosk developers have already complained that it makes it difficult if not impossible to run a serious kiosk?

Their "workaround" was to run as a different profile on demand? That means I have to save all tabs, shutdown everything, then restart as a different profile? Sorry, I actually keep my machine running for months on end with IE Windows nested far up my taskbar (I dont' use XP, I hate the "bundled taskbar windows idea"). Now I have to kill all of them before I open a foreign URL in fear of Cross-site scripting? And thanks to the ridiculous load up time (which I cannot blame them entirely for), this makes it more expensive to do.

Sorry, just that the Mozilla developer's attitude is disgusting. A Mozilla developer insisted "per process was monolithic" and this issue was only a big deal "three years ago". (https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=8617 4) Gee, this is the same stupid behavior Netscape used for years. So where is the "cutting edge" non-monolithic feel? Because, running a handful of browser windows at a time and being forced to close every single one out sure feels more monolithic to me. That's exactly the reason why Unix GUI browsers were horrible for power users, and now it turns out Firefox heads just re-continued the monolithic thinking. Good job!

The Firefox developers insisted this isn't a security issue (oh but it is), insisted it is a pointless feature (web devs and power users use this all the time), and insisted no one does this (right, that's why now they are seeing flak beyond flak?).

I totally understand if they cannot fix it easily due to their poor design choice early on. However, their rational for being unable to do so is a huge cop out. Their poor design skill in the beginning only made me wonder once again, how grounded to reality are these open source developers?

Ok so is this just FUD or is he on to something? He claims a pretty big security hole, one that I don't think I have seen discussed here or elsewhere. I'm by no means a security expert but this sounds pretty serious to me.

Re:Does MS care?

[statusbar]

Wouldn't it be fairly easy and helpful to modify glade [gnome.org] to output XUL?

--jeff++