Firefox Tops 100 Million Downloads

webslash writes "Mozilla's Firefox web browser crossed the 100 million downloads milestone today. Webmasters are adding Firefox download counters on websites to keep track of the downloads in real time. Firefox celebrated 50 million downloads just 6 months back and with the release of Firefox 1.5 Beta 2. Additionally the Firefox 2/3 roadmap also looks promising."

Some misc. Browser Percentage Data - GO FF!

Looking at the browser data for this month so far on the halloween webcam [komar.org], there is 64.3% IE, 27.2% Firefox, 2.5% Safari, 1.2% Netscape, 0.8% Mozilla, 0.7% Opera, and the rest misc. - even a handful of hits from WebTV and Firebird.

In comparison, the 2004 Christmas webcam [komar.org] had 67.9% IE, 21.1% Firefox, 2.7% Netscape, 2.7% Safari, 2.4% Mozilla, and 1.6% Opera. Not a lotta change, although one interesting thing is the drop in Mozilla (everyone uses Firefox now?) and Netscape - no surprise on the later.

This would support some of the press that says Firefox growth is slowing. Having said that, Firefox just ROCKS - really sucks when you can do something cool in HTML/CSS (example :hover) and IE doesn't support it. And obligatory "extensions are cool" too ... GO FIREFOX!

Re:Some misc. Browser Percentage Data - GO FF!

W3 Schools' Browser Stats page [w3schools.com] has it more like this:

IE: 75.5%
Firefox: 18.0%
Mozilla: 2.5%
Netscape: 0.4%
Opera: 1.2%

Worth mentioning, though, is that any site that attracts tech-savvy people is going to have a disproportionaly high percentage for Firefox. This means that

1. Good browser statistics are hard to come by.
2. Smart people use firefox.

Re:Some misc. Browser Percentage Data - GO FF!

Additionally the Firefox 2/3 roadmap also looks promising."

In what way? There's absolutely nothing on the linked page about Firefox 2 or Firefox 3 (presumably what Firefox two-thirds means) except a single codename: "The Ocho." Are you saying that this codename is promising? Or did the submitter of the article not even read the link he pasted in there?

Re:Some misc. Browser Percentage Data - GO FF!

It will never happen. See above: "Smart people Don't use IE."

So when /.'s results come in with a 96% IE score, the slashdot image will be ruined. The geeks will stop coming because it will be confirmed that they're surrounded by lusers. The lusers will stop coming because the geeks aren't here to troll anymore. Ad impressions will plummet! Funding will cease! Servers will fall into disrepair! Dogs and cats will live together! Mass Hysteria!

More sec bugs = more downloads

More sec bugs => more downloads

Google News/.

What does this have to do with Google?

Net Installations

Yeah,

100 million, billion, jillion, whatever is great. Those numbers can be achieved via the same people downloading multiple releases. But, how many singular installtions are there. Now that would be an interesting statistic.

Re:Net Installations

Updates done from within Firefox don't count against the download count. Additionally, it doesn't track people who may download the installers from mirrors.

THat being said, I agree that it would be a more helpful stat to know how many unique installed copies there are out there (I've downloaded it multiple times on a couple computers due to reformats).

Go Firefox

It's at times like this when I feel so good about being part of the Firefox community. Let's keep working towards a safer internet and safer computers. Go Firefox!

usage on the way up too?

What are your percentages looking like on *your* web site ? Statcounter is telling me almost 40% are using some flavor of Firefox lately... Safari is on the rise too!

Free As In Beer - Opera

This is not a troll, but ever since Opera went free-as-in-beer, my Firefox icon gets used about as frequently as my IE link does (I have the IE 7 beta as well, but it's just laughable in comparison).

Of course to me the primary benefits of Firefox were standards compliance, features, cross-platform capabilities, and free-as-in-beer. I get all of those advantages, along with improved speed and a few more feaures (e.g. native SVG, something that is coming to a stable Firefox release any-year-now), in Opera. Of course I do miss some of the Firefox plug-ins, which is why I jump over to it on occasion.

Am I alone in feeling this way? I suspect that the freeing of Opera has had more of an impact on Firefox than anything Microsoft is doing.

Re:Free As In Beer - Opera

yup, Opera is now my main browser. i jumped to it because i got fed up with Fx's memory leaks. funnily enough, i find similar problems with Opera, but its not *as* slow. i can't figure out whats causing memory use to keep climbing in both browsers yet. also like you i miss some plugins, but most of the vital stuff like mouse gestures and tab controls is in there, and its not so bad (lack of adblock or other content control) if you run everything through a proxy (proxomitron) anyway. i should add i do a ridiculous amount of web browsing and have both browsers open most of the time. i can't really decide which i like more, they're both great. i'm sure Opera is more normal-person (i was going to say newbie, but thats unfair) friendly though, so most people i set up get Opera now. and firefox is more flexible with its extension setup so probably better for geeks and people with "special needs".

hmm

thats alot of firefox. ive downloaded it at least 30 times though so it not like that is their user base? do we get a new ad blocker as a reward?

Versions?

Considering the number of version updates that have been released due to security holes, are they counting *unique* downloads? After all, I have downloaded 1.0.0 through 1.0.7, does that count as seven downloads?

No...

..it counts as 8 downloads. I'm praying you're not a C programmer.

Re:Versions?

IIRC they don't count downloads with a Firefox user-agent. I'm not 100% sure of that, but I recall reading that somewhere.

If that's correct, that means it depends on whether you used Firefox or another browser to download the updated installer.

One wonders.....

.... If a certian chair throwing CEO is taking note.

Ratio of downloads to users

I have downloaded Firefox at least 5 times or so just for myself (upgrades, reinstalls, different computers, etc). I wonder what the statistics are on average number of downloads per person.

Well even if they're ridiculously high, 100 million is a freaking huge number. Even if the average person has downloaded it 10 times, that still means over 10 million people are using it worldwide.

Roadmap?

So we see what version numbers they plan to use. How about some indication of planned features (svg? css3? smil? Qt? client cert creation? ...)

Firefox 2/3

Firefox two thirds? Since when did it slip down five sixths of a version?

promising?

"Additionally the Firefox 2/3 roadmap also looks promising."

can you explain what looks promising in that link concerning 2/3? "The Ocho"? I guess thats promising...

What do they mean by download?

For instance, when mozilla comes out with an upgraded version and my FF browser's auto-update thing downloads the whole new browser version, does that count as one of these downloads? Cause that just means that every time they come out with a new version the download counter gets the who user base added to it.

100 million is impressive, Im just wondering where the numbers are coming from.

Is this is coincidence?

It's my birthday today!

"The Ocho"

In case anyone was wondering where they got the name "The Ocho" for the name of FireFox 2.0, I believe it was from the movie, Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story [imdb.com], where the station that was covering the dodgeball tournament was "ESPN 8" aka "the ocho".

Yeah, the roadmap looks promising

For 2.0 it's gonna be The Next Big Thing. And for 3.0 The Next Next Big Thing.

What a promise!

How many unique?

Not to jab at the spirit of TFA, but how many unique downloads does this equate to? What does 100M downloads really mean? I've downloaded Firefox dozens of times since v1.0 because of system rebuilds or other reasons. I have to imagine that other sys admins and power users out there have downloaded it more times than me for the same reason(s).

I'm just glad...

I'm just glad that with more people using Firefox it means more websites can't ignore gecko browsers, especially since I use the Mozilla Suite. It has has the effect of discontinuing the suite, but at least I can use Seamonkey [mozilla.org] and get an updated suite, and maybe i'll switch over when they finish the whole XUL Runner [mozilla.org], so running multiple applications (Mail, Browser, Chat, etc), wont each create their own XUL baggage.

And the meaning is

While this is great news it doesn't really tell us anything about how many people are using firefox. Every good geek out there downloads just about every new release which means that figure is huge compared to the user base. They might as well have just said "We do a lot of releases". It has basically the same meaning.

Top 10 browsers for RubyForge

Are here [blogs.com]. Not many folks still using IE 6.0! Of course, RubyForge is a pretty niche web site...

I would have posted the stats here, but the lameness filter stymied me. Ah well.

looks promising

Additionally the Firefox 2/3 roadmap also looks promising.

You dumbass. They don't say jack shit about Firefox 2 or 3. Woowee! The code name is a reference from Dodgeball! Holy shit, I can't wait for that. It sounds really, really promising! OMG!

The number for 1.5 will have more weight

I hope they have a separate counter for the release version of FF 1.5 because that will be truer account of FF's popularity.

It's one thing to have FF 1.0x but given the auto-update feature in FF 1.5, you'd have to be a fool not to upgrade.

I just hope you don't need to run FF 1.5 as Admin for the Auto-update feature to work.

The Next Next Big Thing?!

I don't care so much about statistics, but got interested by this quote:

Additionally the Firefox 2/3 roadmap also looks promising.

Let's look the roadmap...
2.0, "The Ocho", 2006, The Next Big Thing
3.0, ???, Bugs, The Next Next Big Thing

Nice, but what would be the goals for The Next Big Thing? To quote again:

Goals
We are still working on goals for 2.0/3.0 and are drafting a PRD for its development. Some likely goals include:
* Improvements to Bookmarks/History
* Per-Site Options
* Enhancements to the Extensions system, Find Toolbar, Software Update, Search and other areas.
* Accessibility compliance
* More ... ?

That doesn't look very promising to me. It would be revolutionary if web browsers in general could break the monopoly of JavaScript and introduce other script languages (python, ruby,...) on the client side. This would boost the web applications much further as they are now. That's just a wish, but probably a security nightmare.

Still my question remains: what's the next big thing for web browsers?

Firefox on 4 month decline at w3schools.com

Firefox has been on a precipitous decline at w3schools.com. For each of the last 4 months Firefox has lost user share, while IE has risen. In fact, IE is the only browser with a rising share over the last 4 months.
http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.a sp [w3schools.com]

May 2005 ===> Sept 2005
IE 5 and 6: 71.6% ===> 75.5%
Firefox: 21.0% ===> 18.0%
Mozilla: 3.1% ===> 2.5%
Netscape 0.7% ===> 0.4%
Opera 7 and 8: 1.3% ===> 1.2%

Additionally the Firefox 2/3 roadmap...

Additionally the Firefox 2/3 roadmap also looks promising."

should be:

Additionally the Firefox 2.0/3.0 roadmap also looks promising."

Just looks like Firefox has a 2/3 compromise... reminds me of 3/5 compromise [wikipedia.org]. Is that how browser statistics will be measured?

/joking of course.

Keep in coming, give me all you got!

Been enjoying the releases, having it as preferred browser since the phoenix days, on different platforms. Windows releases are really great, Linux releases, well its a plugin thing, something which have been improved greatly.

Now on the FreeBSD platform it is pretty stable as well, I just wish FreeBSD/Gnome/Mozilla+ could get together, especially I'ld cheer for much better plugin support/installation/management. But guess, the plugin system is still not that cross platform? having to have everything compiled, for firefox updates and java as well..

Well perhaps next christmas.
But definately, things are moving great. Lets keep it up, have to control the upper ground before Microsoft will attack with alternative lock tactics with Vista, Winforms and what else they got coming to keep the technology coming together for the users across platforms.

Firefox, the Family Browser

Most of my family uses Firefox. The only one left is my mother who complains that some sites don't work. But my father, and two sisters have used Netscape when I first got them on the computer, then Mozilla, and now Firefox. I've even got my father on Thunderbird. And the only one who complains about problems with the computer: my mother. Everyone else, I never hear a peep out of. And of course, I use it.

Free ad blocking going mainstream, not good

The firefox web developer toolbar extension is a necessity for anyone working on websites. SearchStatus, IE View, CustomizeGoogle, and Adblock are also extensions I couldn't live without.

I used to want to tell the world about this great new browser called firefox, but more and more I now want to keep it my little secret. If a program like Adblock were to become part of the standard firefox package (like pop-up blocking currently is) and also turned on by default to block most ads, whats going to happen to websites that depend on ad revenue to exist?

If firefox, or Opera, were to theoretically add ad blocking by default, and in turn advertise their browser as the one that makes all the annoying ads go away, it could really begin to take market share from IE. The bigger fear is that microsoft will then add their own ad blocking feature which would mean that ad blocking would become main stream.

The fact that webmasters seem to be the biggest promoter of this, or any alternative browser, seems ironic. Finding that millions of people now have the opportunity to not view my ads, is not exactly good news.

Promising roadmap?

"Additionally the Firefox 2/3 roadmap also looks promising. [mozilla.org]"

Really? All I saw listed for 2 and 3 was "The Next Big Thing" and "The Next Next Big Thing". Maybe this is the wrong link?

Way to go...

Yeehaw!

Hard to deploy in a network

Firefox is certainly a great home browser. It's the one I use, and I recommend it to everyone else.

But it is still far too dificult to deploy on a company network. I know, I have done it. I used FFdeploy to make it a bit easier.

Now that FF is on a solid path to conquer the personal desktops it deserves, I would really like to see some progress towards helping administators manage network installs.

How do I upgrade 25 client machines running 1.0.4 to 1.0.7 on a Samba network? Ideally, I would just put all files somewhere, and call xcopy from the logon script. Unfortunately, it is almost certain to break stuff (particularly with extensions).

Whew!...

I guess I can finally stop hitting that download button over and over and over. I wore out 3 mice already!

roadmap also looks promising ?

It does?
Looks like a mostly pointless document to me. Unless you mean the 4 minor "likely goals" listed that might be in 1.5, 2.0, or 3.0.

I'm a relative outsider to the ins and outs of Firefox (a KDE/Konqueror user), but that page sums up the project as a whole to me. They've gotten too big, too quickly, and can't really cope.

I hope the document is just wildly out of date.

FF is great, but there are problems.......

I think everybody on slashdot is aware that there have been some security problems with FF (I don't have time to hunt for the links, just do a search here). I personally love FF, have since it's infancy, but I can't help but foresee similar problems in the future.

I think the source of the problem is that Mozilla is spreading out too fast. And it's hurting their products. For example, I just had to uninstall and reinstall FF; I'm browsing my fave extensions to reinstall as I write this. A month ago I had to uninstall and reinstall SeaMonkey (the classic Mozilla, which my husband prefers to FF). In both cases, it seems some of the app's files became corrupted.

How many programmers are regularly working with Mozilla? How many on each project? I don't know personally, but I'm betting that most of them are working on multiple projects. And how many Mozilla projects are there? SeaMonkey, Firefox, Thunderbird (best email client I've ever seen, btw), Camino, Sunbird.... am I forgetting any? Probably.

I like the new free opera, but I don't use it much. Opera doesn't have two things that makes the Mozilla browsers invaluable to me - you can turn off software installation and you can get extensions. You have to turn on software installation to install extensions, but otherwise you can turn it off and leave it off, and this helps secure your PC (if you know this, you're probably thinking "duh!", but you'd be surprised how many people using FF don't know).

What's my point? Don't count your chickens before the eggs hatch. Firefox is gaining popularity, and it should, but I'm going to wait until 1.5 is in final release before I begin celebrating. I'm just holding out for hope that these recent spate of problems won't become a long-lasting trend. Only time will tell.

Firefox getting worse with every release

Anyone else noticing Firefox getting more and more bloated and buggy with every release? I remember it being swift and stable about a year ago (0.7 days?), but now it takes years to load, downloads don't always work, and I simply can't use tabs as it leads to a crash within an hour. I thought the idea behind the Firefox fork was a lighter, speedy alternative to Mozilla, but now Firefix seems to have a pretty alarming rate of feature bloat. I find myself wanting to know what the alternatives to the alternative are now.

An Informal Survey Of Blog Stats

I think Firefox usage is quite a bit higher than people think. A lot of blogs contain public Sitemeter information that includes browser share. For sites like Instapundit [instapundit.com], Daily Kos [dailykos.com], or Red State [redsate.org] Firefox usage is anywhere from 25-40% of total browsers. My own site has IE just under 50%, Firefox with 35-40%, and Safari hovering around 10% depending on the time of the survey.

Granted, blog readers tend to be somewhat more ahead of the curve than Joe or Jane Sixpack, but they're also indicative of where the market will be a few years down the road. The problem IE and Microsoft faces is that while they have a very high marketshare, their mindshare sucks - everyone uses Microsoft products but only those who take return trips to the Kool Aid bowl particularly like doing it. When an alternative like Firefox comes along that doesn't take a CS degree to use, people start switching, and the stats on more technically-oriented sites bear that out.

Did I miss something?

Don't you have to download Firefox every time you want to upgrade/patch?

All webbrowsers seem to be becoming the same

From an end user perspective, IE7, Opera and Firefox are ALL THE SAME. Why?

1). All feature integrated pop-up blocking
2). All feature Tabbed browsing
3). All open webpages.
4). All have their own specific security holes

So why would I spend the time to download firefox or opera or any other browser for that matter if the one that comes with my OS does what I need. I use IE when I use windows (1% of the time) and firefox when Im in Linux (99% of the time). I'm glad the media hype has gotten Firefox in the mainstream, now can we please work on features for the average non-web programmer that make one browser better then another?.

Mozilla press release

Mozilla Corp. press release [mozilla.org] about the 100 million downloads.

Bogus statistics

Listen- I like firefox. I'm using it right now. I use it in preference over IE. I lobby for it on my financial web sites.

But the numbers are bogus.

Every patch generates a ton of new downloads.
I download it once and install it on multiple computers. But it patches from each new computer as a new download.

What's important is market share- not some wierd counter of downloads.

Spread the Word!

If all IT managers do as i did soon we'll have FF all over businesses.

People at the office were reluctant at first when i started to change all of the browsers to firefox but now everyone is happy and i'm happy. we are a big loving family thanks to firefox.

2 main thing that made it possible:

1-find the right themes. bells and whistles. peeps just love that. something that kinda have that Aqua look and they got a new toy to play with. lovely.

2-The IE Browser plug-in. that's the clencher. people complains that some website are IE only. just right click and open in IE.

soon we'll be done and over with the IE foolishness.

...and on a similar note that google desktop is just the best. Loving it.

Yeah Yeah

But can we talk about the new DUAL CORE DUAL PROC G5's that came out hours ago and still no slashdot article in sight ?!?!?! I'm freakin dying over here. IMAGINE........ [apple.com] an xgrid cluster of those ! Okay I'll wait for TFA now...

Can we deduct my three downloads?

I downloaded Firefox several times, but particularly after it hit 1.0 release status (the initial download and a couple of bug upgrades).

I've ended up staying with Opera. It's just much, much better in the end.

So can we have those stats updated to reflect that my downloads ended up being a waste of time? Just pretend I didn't do it, and we'll all be happier for it. I know I am!

I discovered some kind of bug with Firefox

And I wanted to tell the FF devs about it, but then I have to register to bugzilla, and Bugmenot was of no use?!

Anyway, in case anyone is curious, the bug is I was trying to upload a 75mb file to megaupload.com, and the upload speed kept tapering off from 50kb/s down to 10kb/s or so, until about 20-30mb, and then I got a "file contains no data" (iirc) message.

Then I tried with IE, and the upload started at 30kb/s, and went up to 40kb/s, and stayed at this speed til the upload was complete.

Sex sells

I am working to spread the firefox browser.

We all know that sex sells.

So try to look at this site http://www.thelovesearch.com/ [thelovesearch.com] using Microsoft
Internet Explore. It will try to convince your to use Firefox using
sex appeal.

If we could convince all porn sites to only support Firefox the battle
would be won in a few weeks.

Or am I dreaming now ??

If Only They Had an Uninstall Counter...

I downloaded Firefox once upon a time... in fact a couple times, on different machines to try it out. Didn't take me long to figure out I didn't like it, and I still preferred good ol' IE6. So Firefox went out the Window.

I'd be curious as to how many of the 100 million downloads are actually still installed and being used...

1 millionth

and when is /. going to celebrate its one millionth Id?

Re:I gave Firefox a chance

As long as we're dropping anecdotes, I never close Firefox on my P4/2.4 with 1GB of memory and never see any excessive swapping under Linux.

With a 2.4 GHz Athlon 64, 2 GB of DDR400, and two 7200 RPM 8 MB cache drives in RAID 0

You were just waiting for a chance to slip that into the conversation, weren't you?

Foxes?

A veritable skulk [wikipedia.org] of Firefoxen? *Ducks*

Re:I gave Firefox a chance

I couldn't agree with you more. This is my main problem with Firefox. I think the browser has a lot of potential, but it's extremely slow and bloated. There's no reason why Firefox needs to be eating up 175MB of memory with only 3 tabs open. Not to mention the problems with its slowness after minimization and everything else that you noted. I've also noticed that it's slow to start upon initial start, as well.

The slowness factor and memory issues are the only things keeping me from using Firefox 100%. Things like the Web Developer extension are unmatched anywhere else, and when combined with some other really grat plugins, Firefox has all the right tools... now it just needs to focus on speed and those memory issues that have been around for such an awfully long time now....

Big difference in Firefox for Windows and Linux

I gave Firefox a chance. ...now I refuse to use it. The developers have had ample time to optimize the browser and its memory management, but they haven't. ... I'll have a Firefox window with about 8 tabs open, I'll minimize it, and then go play a game. When I quit the game 1-2 hours later, and try to bring FIrefox back up, the chugging begins. It takes about a minute to bring the Firefox window back up, my hard drive being slammed...

I told a friend of mine that uses Windows to try Firefox and he later claimed something similar. I would like to say that this is not indicative of my Linux experience with Firefox. It works as expected, with no latency, and is not bogged-down by my running of more applications/tabs/etc.

Re:Whitedust = Firefox Land

But is that really surprising? Whitedust is a security-related site. Of course people who bother to keep up to date with computer security will not be using Internet Explorer (if they're even using Windows). It's not really surprising that security-conscious users use a relatively more secure browsers (like Firefox).

Re:I gave Firefox a chance

Your doing something wrong - right now I only use about 65megs of memory for FF and I've got a few tabs open.

I can't tell you how many problems are user based. I've worked tech support, in business and in family. It pains me so to see people smearing quality software's good name in place of intelligence. No your CD ROM tray is NOT a cup holder. No Firefox does NOT take 200megs of memory. End of story.

Re:I gave Firefox a chance

The problem is whether you're running Windows, or Linux. In Windows, FF starts leaking like a sieve after you put a few tabs up. Linux, you notice no memory usage that's not normal (about 20-30 megs of memory, tops) and it remains fast and responsive, even after leaving it running for a long time

Under Windows, if I leave a FF browser with two or three tabs open running, and come back maybe 1 1/2 hours later, about half of my system memory is beng hogged by FF. (512 megs, FF reports using 210 of that under the Task Manager in Windows XP Professional)

So, no smearing of names here. It works great for one OS and it just seems to suck under another OS. For all we know it could be something Microsoft is causing. I will admit one thing, FireFox is getting a bit more bloated with each release. Instead of writing patches, why not just re-write the vulnerable code so that it works, and release a new version, not a patch? We may have to wait longer but at least we'll know the code's been "fixed" (and hopefully optimized.)

Re:I gave Firefox a chance

if you're so anti-firefox, why does your "CoMmAnD CeNTeR" have a firefox desktop image?

http://tomchu.com/images/computers/commandcenterde sktop.jpg [tomchu.com]

poser.

Re:I gave Firefox a chance

I'm not going to argue about the memory leaks.
However, I find surprising that only Firefox "chugs" when you try to maximise it. It's a very normal process (especially if it takes more than 200 MB of memory) : it indicates the memory used by the program has been swapped to the disk, and used for more useful purposes, like playing a game.
If other applications maximise quickly, that either mean they don't use much memory (as does Trillian I believe, even though I've never used it), or that for somewhat reason they kept using the main memory (Photoshop being also a memory hog). And the last reason is indeed bad.

Re:I gave Firefox a chance

Man, I don't know why this is modded down. On windows it's true. Mine is 28 windows @ 211,788K. That's more than Outlook which is a big hog. I might just give Opera a try.

Re:I gave Firefox a chance

Yeah, my Firefox is kinda slow to start, say 30 seconds to about 1 minute to load, but of course that's because I'm using Portable Firefox [johnhaller.com] on an USB drive. Occasionally I'll have issues with FF crashing on me when I've been running it for a while, but of course I've enabled caching on the USB drive (against recommendations) and only have 5 meg free on the drive. And Sometimes it drops the internet connection altogether when it's idle for about 3 minutes when I'm using it on my Treo via win-hand anywhere, but it comes right back up when I turn the treo back on (so weird - why does this happen?). So I guess you've convinced me, FIREFOX SUCKS!! I'm going back to IE.