Firefox 2 Downloads Top 2 million in 24 Hours

linuxci writes "Firefox 2.0 has had over two million downloads in 24 hours with a peak rate of over 30 downloads a second. This means Firefox is well on track to beat IE7's three million in four days. Of course stats don't equal users but it's interesting to see that the demand for Firefox is currently outstripping IE."

Re:But who needs to download IE?

Only four, because it took over 28 hours to install from floppy.

Re:But who needs to download IE?

That was 8 years ago and people were desperate to get off of 95.

No, they weren't. Indeed, the take-up of Windows 98 could only be described - generously - as "sluggish".

Slashdot, at the time, was overjoyed at how poorly received Windows 98 was, considering it another sign of Microsoft's downfall and using it as another example of how Linux on everyone's desktop was only 12 months away...

Re:To be fair...

There is no auto-update from Firefox 1.5 to 2.0 yet. And there is no Windows Update for IE7 yet. Those figures are all but meaningless. The numbers show that early adopters are equaly likely to download FF2 and IE7 (or maybe download both).

And what about RC3 Downloads?

After all, I never downloaded the final release since I already had RC3 and nothing changed.

RC3 was the same as 2.0

For those that didn't know Firefox 2 RC3 was the same release as the final 2.0 so people who had already downloaded the release candidate didn't need to download the final (Help > About shows the build number and they're identical). This is usual with Mozilla releases, the release candidates are actual candidates for release (unlike MS) so the final RC usually becomes the real release.

So people with RC3 don't count in these stats unless they didn't realise and downloaded 2.0 again.

Re:A pity.

That's what Google is for. Anyway, the best way to remember the URL for Firefox downloads is getfirefox.com or even just firefox.com will get you there eventually.

Re:A pity.

or ie7.com

The one feature that makes it worth the download..

...an integrated spell checker for all HTML text form fields.

Plus, it's a relatively trim download, so cheers to the dev team for that.

I've downloaded both and one is easier

I downloaded IE7 on one of my school's computers. It took a little while to download, took a long time to install, required a reboot of the computer, and I've used it twice so far. To be fair, I wasn't an IE user before IE7 and don't have a lot of interest in using it now. I downloaded it out of curiosity.

I downloaded Firefox 2.0 on two machines at home and eighteen machines at work. It downloaded very quickly, installed even faster, and did not require a reboot. It also installed over my old version, asked if I wanted to check for updates to extensions, and moved all my bookmarks over. (IE7 might have done this too, but I didn't check.)

All in all, Firefox is easier, has a cleaner layout, and just plain works. Way to go Firefox. What a great program.

whats the fuss about

i preferred phoenix anyways

Nothing unexpected

Who are the people who are most likely to download a new browser right after its release ? The guys who read IT news everyday with great interest...Call them Geeks, Devellopers, or typical Slashdot's reader it doesn t matter...

The point is : do theses guys use IE as their main browser ? No.
Are they using Firefox as their main browser ? The majority of them does.

Therefore they are more likely to get Firefox 2.0 than IE7 (although many of them will get both in case they stumble upon a IE-only website). So its absolutly normal that the initial rush is in favor of Firefox...In the same way that Firefox's RC were more used than IE7's RC. Actually if Firefox had a lower download rush i would have quite worried for them.

IE only on english computers

Considering that you currently can't install IE7 on anything but an ENGLISH XPSP2, which excludes the majority of worldwide users.

I wouldn't jump to conclusions right now, you might be embarrassed later.

Annoyances

Here are some of the settings that I've gathered so far to get Firefox 2.0 to my liking:

In about:config
* browser.tabs.closeButtons to 3 for one close tab button
* browser.tabs.selectOwnerOnClose to false for successive reading and closing
* browser.tabs.tabminwidth to 20 for displaying tab scrolling in extreme cases only
* browser.urlbar.hideGoButton no use for the Go button
* dom.disable_window to true, fix various window annoyances
* network.prefetch-next to false for not wasting my bandwidth

In userChrome.css for disabling the List all tabs which annoys me when using the close button:
/* Disable Container box for "List all Tabs" Button */
.tabs-alltabs-stack {
display: none !important;
}

Feel free to add your own to the thread.

It still isn't production quality software!

Yep its just like the fancy new Christmas toy that has a few more bells and whistles than last year's toy. Unfortunately it lasted less than a hour before I managed to break it.

I downloaded Firefox 2.0 and installed it under Linux (Gentoo 2.6.17-r7).

Just for the heck of it I tried the same tests I tried in 1.5 and filed bug reports about several months ago. Sure enough Firefox 2.0 does *NOT* handle memory allocation failures. If one limits the amount of virtual memory (e.g. ulimit -Sv 115000) and starts firefox shortly thereafter it will core dump and will open a Talkback Incident window. I managed to file 3 different reports in 30 minutes of using it with memory limits in the range from 100-120MB.

While I anticipate the bookmarks handling may be better (1.5 never should have been released until its bookmarks handling was on par with Netscape 4.72!) I still do not consider this to be production quality software. It will not be until it has decent handling of the various types of resource allocation failures (can't open tab, can't open window, can't allocate memory for image, script, network connection, etc.).

Though I haven't tested it yet I also suspect they haven't handled things like window switching or efficient session restart. The open window (tab) should have top CPU and network priority until it is displayed. Any excess CPU or network resources can be dedicated to non-lead tabs or mininimized windows. They probably also haven't handled the heap fragmentation issue -- so after using Firefox for a week and one has opened 100 windows and 700 tabs (pushing the memory usage up to 1.2GB) it will still take 15 minutes or more to simply close all the windows and exit from Firefox (presumably because it has to merge all of the memory fragments being deallocated). Upon restarting the same session one will find that Firefox only needs 900MB. That is a memory leak and/or heap fragmentation problem.

Please, no comments about how I shouldn't be using my browser this way... You use your browser your way, I'll use it my way. I happen to like to work on multiple things at the same time and when I'm writing research papers it isn't uncommon for me to open hundreds of sources simultaneously. I wouldn't have started limiting the virtual memory and run into Firefox's failings in that area at all if 1.5 hadn't turned out to be such an excessive memory consumer.

The interesting question one might ask is how one releases software and specifies what its minimal memory requirements are if you don't limit its memory to determine that? I can only assume that the Firefox developers picked their numbers out of thin air [1].

As an aside it may be worth noting that Firefox 1.5.0.7 does run under Windows 98 on a 75 MHz Pentium that only has 132MB of memory. It doesn't have the performance that Netscape 4.72 can show on the same machine though. As the 2.0 memory requirements seem to have increased (presumably due to the SQL libraries for bookmarks & history handling) I strongly doubt its performance would be improved over 1.5.0.7.

1. Firefox 2.0 will *NOT* run in the Linux specified Minimum System Requirements of 64MB of RAM [2] unless you also have several hundred MB of swap space. And believe me, having pushed Firefox memory to ~70% of system RAM under Linux -- you would *not* want to try to use it even on a 128MB system due to Firefox's problems with heap memory management and the poor paging performance it generates under Linux.
2. http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/system-requir ements.html [mozilla.com]

Re:It still isn't production quality software!

Ok,
I won't comment on how you use your browser. But here's a question, is there ANY browser that would be able to handle the stress tests you used?

If there is another browser that can handle "hundreds" of open sessions, and still work well for you, then perhaps that is a better fit for your purposes.

Otherwise you're pushing your browser to the extremes, then pointing out its faults, however nothing else can handle it either.

So what the hell happened to all the fuss?

Specifically, the fuss about the US Gov demanding IE be removed from Windows? It seems to have disappeared from public memory, just like Bird Flu.

Re:Well, how many UNINSTALLED IT?

Everyone should know by now that extensions often take a few weeks to get updated. The extension mechanism can be annoying when there's a major update but it's like that so that extension authors are encouraged to test their extensions with new versions.

Most people actually use Firefox without extensions and by default it's a lot more featureful than IE6 and about as featureful as IE7 some people say too much was put in 2.0. You can't please everybody so instead of putting everything under the sun like Seamonkey (the Mozilla suite) or Opera they've decided on the options that are of most use to the most people and allowed others to add the extra features.

Also worth noting is that bugfix support for 1.5 will continue for a while so you can keep using it to wait for all your extensions to be compatible with the new version.

Also, there's choice in the market if Firefox is not for you. I personally prefer Firefox to Opera, but Opera is a good browser and it's worth trying it may suit your needs better.

Re:Most people don't know IE7 is out

Once Windows automatically downloads IE7 next month, then compare downloads.

The current statistics are interesting because they show user demand as opposed to market share.

No matter how good Firefox may be, it'll never overcome "already installed and automatically updated".

That's funny, because I'm typing this from an Ubuntu 6.10 CD with Firefox 2.0 while the system is installing in the background, when I reboot Firefox 2.0 will be already installed and automatically updated with the rest of the system. On Windows systems the "already installed" part depends on OEMs and automatic updates are done by Firefox itself. Will you be able to browse the web with IE 7 while Vista installs? Will there be system-wide automatic updates or will people still need to update a large part of the system by hand?

Re:Most people don't know IE7 is out

It's funny about who is changing what here. I generally keep IE as the default browser because I get email with links for some admin tasks (approvals) that only work in IE. My main browser is FF, but I want these links to work right so IE stays the "default". However, installing FF 2.0 changed the default to FF without bothering to ask first! That was not appreciated at all. I repeated the install on another machine and it did the same. I did not see anywhere where it asked "would you like to make Firefox your default browser (recommended)". LAME. I like the browser, but that is reprehensible behavior.

Re:Well, how many UNINSTALLED IT?

Really? FF2 seems to be the fastest yet (on all of my machines, one of which is uber, and some of which are old as dirt). This may be different on the Linux version, though...

Re:Download both

I use Opera and complained to a site about their IE only policy/design.
They replied with a Word document.