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Mozilla The Internet Software

Firefox Reaches 10 Million Downloads 600

Posted by timothy 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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Firefox Reaches 10 Million Downloads More

Firefox Reaches 10 Million Downloads

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  • Taking it back (Score:3, Insightful)

    by cghancock01 ( 790341 ) on Saturday December 11, 2004 @09:56PM (#11063576)
    But the work's not over yet...

    • Re:Taking it back (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Eric Giguere ( 42863 ) on Saturday December 11, 2004 @10:32PM (#11063776) Homepage Journal

      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:Taking it back (Score:4, Interesting)

        by nolife ( 233813 ) on Saturday December 11, 2004 @11:18PM (#11063992) Homepage Journal
        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:Taking it back (Score:4, Insightful)

        by MrLint ( 519792 ) on Sunday December 12, 2004 @12:15AM (#11064212) Journal
        IIRC thunderbird, like mozilla before it uses mbox, which is basically a flat mail file. I dont think any mail client quite handles large mbox files fast. OE and O are 'faster' for those things as they are in a proprietary database and indexing there of. So you have a plus with mbox as being portable, human readable, and 'repairable' with a text editor the con of being slow with large files.

        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.

  • Great! (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 11, 2004 @09:56PM (#11063580)
    Consumers will be the only ones to gain from this. Now either Microsoft attempts to get their act together or everyone (myself included) will just go for Firefox.

    • Re:Great! (Score:4, Interesting)

      by kai.chan ( 795863 ) on Saturday December 11, 2004 @10:47PM (#11063848)
      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+%.

    • Does MS care? (Score:3, Interesting)

      by ClosedSource ( 238333 )
      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.

      • Re:Does MS care? (Score:3, Interesting)

        by driptray ( 187357 )

        ...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

  • Rollover (Score:4, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 11, 2004 @09:56PM (#11063583)
    Welcome to counter rollover day on slashdot. Please run out to your cars and see if you might reach some important milestone on your odometer, it may be worth a story.

  • It's just funny to me... (Score:5, Funny)

    by mat catastrophe ( 105256 ) on Saturday December 11, 2004 @09:58PM (#11063591) Homepage

    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?

    • 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.

  • Adblock (Score:2, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Adblock is simply the best extension. Get rid of flash ads etc. http://adblock.mozdev.org/ [mozdev.org]
  • We need to keep up with this momentum to make firefox the standard browser.

    I also hope, the firefox/mozilla team does not rest on its laurels, and create new features and innovations which can be used as the basis for the next generation of web applications (the last ones were when there was a competetion of sorts between IE and NS)

    • Re: 10 million enlightened folks (Score:5, Insightful)

      by gidds ( 56397 ) <slashdot.gidds@me@uk> on Saturday December 11, 2004 @10:38PM (#11063806) Homepage
      We need to keep up with this momentum to make firefox the standard browser.

      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!

  • its nice... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by LilGuy ( 150110 ) on Saturday December 11, 2004 @09:59PM (#11063601)
    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.

    • but i've had a few complaints... one being it crashes a whole lot more than ie does...

      I don't know what you are doing, but I haven't seen firefox crash in several months.

      two it takes a bit longer to get it to start up for the first time

      I find that Firefox load very quickly, expecially when compared to other third party apps running on a windows pc.

      and three embedded windows media files won't seem to play at all

      Tools-->Options-->Downloads-->File Types. Make sure that the media play of you

    • Re:its nice... (Score:3, Interesting)

      by bunratty ( 545641 )
      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.

  • IE IS DEAD! (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 11, 2004 @09:59PM (#11063603)
    IE is dead! Netcraft confirmeth!

    • Re:IE IS DEAD! (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Zocalo ( 252965 ) on Saturday December 11, 2004 @10:24PM (#11063731) Homepage
      Good fscking riddence if it is given the appalling implementation of CSS in IE that MS claims is "standards compliant". I've just put together a CSS based website using Firefox to do my initial development. OK, I'm a little on the cutting edge with the design, but Opera, Safari and Konqi all manage at least a passable stab at rendering it - nothing that you'd know was a problem unless you knew to look for it. IE, on the otherhand, is just so far out there you wouldn't believe with radically different renderings between platforms, IE versions, even Service Pack levels, and don't even get me started on "Quirks" and "Standards" modes...

      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...

  • well the statistics are flawed (Score:5, Funny)

    by Nadsat ( 652200 ) on Saturday December 11, 2004 @10:00PM (#11063605) Homepage
    I downloaded 8 million of them myself. So the numbers perhaps are slightly misleading.

    • Re:well the statistics are flawed (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Zocalo ( 252965 ) on Saturday December 11, 2004 @10:10PM (#11063662) Homepage
      But by a similarly exaggerated amount I downloaded one copy and deployed it onto 8 million PCs, so it probably balances out. 10m downloads is all very impressive, but I don't see any way of converting that into the actual userbase that would be any more reliable than taking a guess. In addition to the above cases you've also got people that have since removed it (wait till the next IE exploit, fools!), installs onto multiuser systems, those that have installed from magazine cover disks, third party package archives or distro updates.

      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...

      • 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...

        The OEMs have shipped tens of millions of XP systems since August with IE 6-SP2 as the default.
        Despite all the fuss and fume on Slashdot, the rollout of SP2 has gone pretty well. I'd not be greatly surprised to see Firefox stall out at about it's current market share.

  • Including... (Score:3, Informative)

    by laughingcoyote ( 762272 ) <(moc.eticxe) (ta) (lwohtsehgrab)> on Saturday December 11, 2004 @10:04PM (#11063620) Journal

    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.

    • Three copies for me, one for each of my systems. Unfortunately still have to use IE at work, but working on that. :(.

      As long have enough quota space at work, you should be able to run firefox. You don't need to run the installer - just unpack the
      zip file in your home dir...
      from here [207.200.85.49].

    • Re:Including... (Score:5, Informative)

      by FyRE666 ( 263011 ) * on Saturday December 11, 2004 @10:57PM (#11063900) Homepage
      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...

      • Ditto. (Score:3, Interesting)

        by bs_02_06_02 ( 670476 )
        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.

  • SessionSaver (Score:4, Interesting)

    by IO ERROR ( 128968 ) <error@ioe[ ]r.us ['rro' in gap]> on Saturday December 11, 2004 @10:04PM (#11063624) Homepage Journal
    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? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by X0563511 ( 793323 ) on Saturday December 11, 2004 @10:04PM (#11063626) Homepage Journal
    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.

  • what still is buggy (in Mac version)... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by bikerguy99 ( 650704 ) on Saturday December 11, 2004 @10:14PM (#11063683)
    is how Firefox works with "PDF browser plugin": opening a PFD doc in one tab kills wheel srolling in other tabs... The plugin works seamlessly in Safari otherwise I haven't seen any other problems
  • Granted that IE is a security nightmare...but Firefox 1.0 with it's extensions and plugins has been a nasty problem on my windows machine. Running it on my windows machine causes a lot of paging and CPU activity- so much so that the machine hangs. It stays slow even after I kill firefox.

    I didn't have any of these problems on Linux. I am not sure if it is Firefox or it's extensions or plugins.
    • My Pentium III 800mhz machine is just fine with Firefox 1.0 with maybe 3 or so extensions. What machine are you running?
    • If your machine becomes slow due to firefox, that is one thing....but if it stays slow after you killed firefox, then you should either consider ditching Win9x, or if you are running NT base, then you should look for a real source of the problem.
    • Firefox does have some memory leaks, but if the problem is happening quickly it is probably a combination of the plugins and extensions. Check for updates on the plugins and try living without the extensions. Aside from User Agent Switcher, I've uninstalled all my extensions. While nice, few of them match the level of professionalism of the core product.
    • There is no medicine heal all diseases. discuss it at mozillazine forum, submit a bug... may solve this problem at last.
  • Avary landed on Trunk a few days ago, so there's significant improvements in the 1.0+ version which will go on to be developed towards 1.1, though likely less stable and with a whole hoast of new bugs people are already reporting that it's got faster page load times.

    Not to mention the best benifit, 1.0+ renders slashdot correctly :)

  • Meanwhile at W3schools, things are moving... fast (Score:5, Informative)

    by Jugalator ( 259273 ) on Saturday December 11, 2004 @10:19PM (#11063712) Journal
    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!
    • ...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 aroun

      • And by 2007 there will be three people using Firefox for every two computers in the world, By 2008 there will be 14 billion people using Firefox. By 2015 there will be more copies of Firefox in use than protons in the observable universe. :-)

        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
  • ...who got the 10 millionth download?

  • Whoops that was me (Score:5, Funny)

    by Control-Z ( 321144 ) on Saturday December 11, 2004 @10:22PM (#11063721)

    I've been trying to download it on a crappy dialup connection. Sorry, sorry.

  • Some Perspective (Score:5, Interesting)

    by FlipmodePlaya ( 719010 ) on Saturday December 11, 2004 @10:24PM (#11063737) Journal
    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.
    • Gaim, for all its awesomeness, has about 5 million.

      That's because most Linux GAIM users have it bundled with their Linux distribution, or download it from their package manager instead of through SourceForge.

      Most Windows users, quite frankly, will use the official client, myself included. Somehow I feel that the official client will work better with the AIM servers than GAIM - its innate/"gut feeling"; don't bother trying to convince me otherwise. I'm glad to use GAIM when on Linux, but AIM feels better
  • Anyone knows of a good working extension for Firefox which works like AI-RoboForm (auto-filling forms/signup with different profiles) ?

    AI Roboform is somehow screwing up with Firefox.

  • Google Suggest (Score:5, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 11, 2004 @10:31PM (#11063771)
    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..

  • Firefox is great! (Score:3, Informative)

    by zippity8 ( 446412 ) on Saturday December 11, 2004 @10:46PM (#11063838)
    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.
  • If you happen to care that people start using some browser other than IE, there is a simple thing that you can do that will help convince people to switch, stop supporting IE.
    All of my friends who want free tech support from me know that if they use IE, they get no sympathy from me.
    None of the websites that I develop personally are tested with IE, they get a small message saying "this site has not been tested with Internet Explorer, and may not work as expected. If you want to be sure you are getting the
  • How do they count downloads?

    Does FireFox send information when it is installed, or is it just through the Mozilla website? If the latter, then it wouldn't help for organisations that download a single copy and distribute, or downloads from mirrors (such as the default for Gentoo using emerge).

  • Nightlies are currently unstable (Score:4, Informative)

    by GarfBond ( 565331 ) on Saturday December 11, 2004 @10:59PM (#11063906)
    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]
  • 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 someo

  • Where can I get a Glibc 2.2 Build? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by KidSock ( 150684 ) on Saturday December 11, 2004 @11:15PM (#11063981)
    Does anyone know where I can get a glibc 2.2 build? Will it even work on systems that weren't released within the last 2 years?

    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 .src.rpms but I'm starting to run into problems. I just wanna get s**t done but I'm going to have to "upgrade" now just because some bum thinks everyone has xft.
  • Only 20 people made up the 10 million downloads.

  • porn - why firefox will take market share (Score:5, Funny)

    by rich42 ( 633659 ) on Saturday December 11, 2004 @11:23PM (#11064019) Homepage
    Firefox is generally better than IE for web surfing.

    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)

    by Nice2Cats ( 557310 ) on Sunday December 12, 2004 @12:08AM (#11064181)
    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.

  • Firefox still has one major issue (Score:5, Interesting)

    by __aailob1448 ( 541069 ) on Sunday December 12, 2004 @01:45AM (#11064551) Journal
    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)
    • 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.

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