Firefox Hits 400 Million Downloads 175
Owen Dansley writes "Firefox hit another milestone this past Friday, when it passed the 400 million download mark.
From its launch in 2004 it took one year to reach 100 million downloads, hitting 200 million downloads just one year later. According to figures released by US consultancy firm Janco and the IT Productivity Center, Firefox currently has 17.4 percent of the browser market — up 5.6 percentage points in the last year. Also within the last year, Microsoft's Internet Explorer browser dropped 9.6 percentage points to a market share of 63.9 percent."
Interesting (Score:5, Interesting)
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I suspect it to be quite different (think, "auto-updates").
auto-update doesn't count (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:Interesting (Score:5, Insightful)
How many were updates? How many were downloaded to replace another copy after say, a wipe-and-reinstall? How many were downloaded, but never installed?
Anyway you look at it, counting downloads doesn't reveal much about the number of Firefox users?
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When in Rome...
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My question is, how many of these are repeat customers. I am running three Windows OSes on one computer, Linux and OSX on another, not only did I download Firefox on each machine, but I will
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IIRC 1.5 will now auto-update to 2.0, though it'll probably be a 2-stage process -- update to the latest 1.5, then update to the latest 2.0.
They're only counting final releases.
According to this comment [spreadfirefox.com], Mozilla estimates ab
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> My question is, how many of these are repeat customers
it goes both ways. Our university computer labs were set up with a single redhat cd 4 years ago, 50+ computers, thousands of users, and they all use firefox, with a single download and
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The problem is you can't reliablly find the firefox market share. Every site you get data from tells a different story ranging from a few percent to more than 50% and of course you don't know if they are telling the truth.
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But it is interesting to wonder nevertheless, these surveys can be interpreted in so many different ways if you put different arguments forward about how the amount of downloads actually represents the amount of people using it..
Safari (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm guessing the quality issues surrounding the Safari for Windows beta have put pay to this concern.
Also, outside of Windows, I thought I'd switch from Firefox on my Mac to Safari following the introduction of tabbed browsing in version 3 but, several months later I'm still Firefox.
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I don't really think quality is the problem. I have reliability problems with Firefox, but I'm still primarily a Firefox user. I think it's a matter of what you're used to and what it takes to switch to something else. I want to block flash on a site-specific basis and there's not a good way to do that.
Also, outside of Windows, I thought I'd switch from Firefox on my Mac to Safari following the introduction of tab
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I want to clarify this to say that there's not a good way to do this in Safari. There are some ways, but they aren't very good, definitely not as good as FlashBlock.
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If you mean Windows ME, and if you are serious, good luck with that. It's a version that is nearly eight years old now, and it was the worst of the 9x series anyway. Using ME is basically an odyssey in masochism.
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To be fair though, I don't use Firefox either, though it is also installed. Opera is still the best browser out there.
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I thought I'd switch from Firefox on my Mac to Safari following the introduction of tabbed browsing in version 3 but, several months later I'm still Firefox.
Safari has always had tabbed browsing. Version 3 added the ability to re-order tabs, and detach them (but sadly not the ability to move tabs between windows). It also added the ability to re-open accidentally closed windows (but not tabs) and all of the w
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Your Own Statistics are More Valuable (Score:2)
In AWstats Safari identity is seen easily. What's your website? Content may or may not affect your usage. 30K is a rather small sample size in my opinion.
Using apx 3.3M hits (650K uniques), I get FF 56.3%, IE 28.5%, Moz 3.1%, Opera 2.3%, Safari 0.5%, Konqueror 1% and others (inc bots) 8%. With 56% using Windows
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But is that 63.9% of IE7 or counting all previous versions?
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There has not been a release of Safari for Windows yet. Probably you meant the public beta.
Even so, I doubt that it will gain a lot of users on Windows anytime soon (even after it is released).
I think the cause is that the beta of Safari for Windows doesn't feel like a native Windows app at all. Neither does Firefox feel native while running on a Mac. This would explain why on my Mac Mini, I
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I think that Firefox for Mac isn't really supposed to feel like a native app—it's supposed to feel like firefox. Mozilla puts out another browserm Camino, that uses Cocoa, native OSX widgers, various other OSX system resources, etc. I don't know if it's as native-feeling as Safari, but I think it's really what's intended to be the Mozil
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(Oddly enough, that's also why I don't use Ubuntu...)
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- Web pages are very pretty compared to Firefox. Much prettier
- Killer bookmark management that no one's ripped off yet
- The mo'awesome find feature ever in 3.0. Love it.
- best browser based RSS feed implementation (I live Mozilla live bookmarks....except there's NO INDICATION that any article are new. I have to keep clicking.)
Still, I don't expect it to have an impact on market share for quite some time, if at all. Perhaps in that great unforseeable future where Mac OS X
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Re:Safari (Score:5, Funny)
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The problem is that it's based on KHTML (from KDE where it's used in Konqueror) which has always been goofy. It is just buggy and doesn't render stuff correctly all the time. Apple has certainly improved it but they should have just went with the Gecko (Firefox) engine for Safari instead of the broken KHTML.
Often it's hard to tell what's broken, and what's not.
For example, yesterday I read a blog post [opera.com] from one of Opera's employees, outlining a debug session with Yahoo! Mail, which stopped working in Opera 9.5 alpha. Yes, there's a bug in Opera which makes Y!Mail broken. However, there is also this:
This breaks Y!Mail because they take a string of perfectly fine XML, wrap it in HTML comment tags, put it inside an <XML> tag, add it inside the BODY tag with that horrendous IE thingy called insertAdjacentHTM
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Not according to any stats I've seen. Safari's marketshare tends to be around 2/3 to 3/4 of total Mac marketshare.
As an example, my main website, which gets a significant amount of general-audience traffic for a comic book fan site it hosts, is currently showing 4.0% Safari for the first 10 days of September, and 6.5% Macintosh for the same period of time. Go back to May -- before the iPhone and Windows versions -- and it's 3.9% and 6.1%.
I'm too lazy to go looking f
Thats not really so impressive...... (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Thats not really so impressive...... (Score:4, Funny)
And I'm responsible for none of those despite the fact that I did Linux install 200 million times for the last three years, so we kinda cancel each other out.
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Wow! What distro are you using?
</smartass>
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That would be funny if I hadn't really had to reinstall Firefox after some auto-update for an add-on apparently reset every preference I had ever set, including some for other add-ons, a few days ago.
(In case anyone's wondering: I had an update of HTML Validator, which seemed to go fine, and Firefox started up as normal after the update. The time after that when I started Firefox, my home page had been reset and several tabs opened up, one of which was all about the Download Statusbar add-on I also use; t
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For what it is worth I used to be a Netscape then Moz user until I discovered tabbed bro
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I'm still hoping to see more developer tools by the time 9.5 final rolls around. There's only so much you can do with custom buttons and bookmarklets. Something comparable to Firebug, or even just the ability to do validation in the background on certain sites (rather than having to submit the page to the online W3C va
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Both browsers are great choices and personally I prefer Opera both because it performs better and I have just gotten used to it since I have used it since about 2001. That is cool that you at least
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Actually, Opera and I go way back. A friend introduced me to it when we were both working at a computer lab in college, around 1998 or 1999. I used it as my primary browser around 2000-2001, until Mozilla got to the point where it was stable enough to use on a daily basis, and Opera just didn't have the site compatibility I wanted at the time. Plus I was switching to Li
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FWIW, I'm seriously considering giving Opera a try. I just decided that mentioning that before was a bit trollish.
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Which means? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Which means? (Score:5, Insightful)
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It measures interest (Score:2)
Sure, some of those were early adopters of Firefox 2, before the auto-update kicked in. But a surprising number of people stayed on 1.5 until
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These figures are much more interesting to me and its great to see Firefox climbing. Of course, site traffic all depends on the target audience; for example, you'd expect to see a higher (and climbing) usage on sites like Slashdot.
I'd be interested to know if your site is aimed at Joe Public, or is it more focused towards the tech. literate?
Downloads vs. Active Use (Score:1, Flamebait)
Congratulations Firefox, you've managed to get a boat load of people to download your browser, but somehow most people reject it after trying it.
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How do you figure? 17% is probably more than last year...the numbers are still going up. Where is it exactly that you get "most " from?
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Better than you'd think ... (Score:2)
Wow, what a big number. But even with all of those downloads the logs from our server shows that only 17% of visitors are actually using it. Over 80% are IE variants.
Congratulations Firefox, you've managed to get a boat load of people to download your browser, but somehow most people reject it after trying it.
Well, actually ...
/. discussion I'll assume it's roughly correct.)
According to http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats.htm [internetworldstats.com] there are currently about 1,173 million people using the internet. (God knows whether this is an accurate number or not, but they seem to think they know what they're doing, and for the purposes of this unscientific
Therefore, 400 million downloads, assuming one download per person, would give a usage base of about 34%.
If Firefox usage is actually 17%, that suggests that about one in
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Open source is not magic. If you write a closed source software and then release it as open source, it will be the same shit it was before. The reason why open source software generally is better is because of the 3 rules from which you have t sacrifice at least one when making software:
- Time
- Money
- Quality
Because open source is often done on free time, without salary and deadlines.
It's the porn (Score:1, Funny)
Down Them All is the dedicated Hand-Shandyist's best friend.
I wonder..... (Score:1)
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Updates downloaded through the auto-update system aren't counted. Neither are copies downloaded from third-party mirrors, or installed via a Linux distro CD, or downloaded once, put on a USB keychain or LAN share, and installed on multiple machines.
Mozilla's Asa Dotzler remarked on another site last week that they have an estimated 120 million users right now, and I seem to recall the retention rate being something like 25%.
Still, it's impr
Google Desktop? (Score:1)
IE isn't down and out yet (Score:2, Insightful)
Mozilla Firefox has a journey ahead of them before the numbers start to show in their favor.
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Despite Firefox gaining some popularity (and Safari showing up in random places, like your Grandmother's house) IE still has a sweaty, firm grip on the market.
Mozilla Firefox has a journey ahead of them before the numbers start to show in their favor.
It's not about being in the majority. It's about being a presence.
For as long as other browsers constituted a tiny minority, small-minded web developers could design for IE and IE alone. The rationale for that was: 'We don't have time or money to bother with standards - everyone uses IE, so we make our site work in IE.'
The argument for standards-based approaches is already valid. We can argue that this approach will work reliably on all platforms. Code for the subset of existing standards that are rel
Predicting the future. (Score:2)
Does Mozilla/Netscape really make up 29.01% (Score:2)
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Ahem... (Score:1, Insightful)
http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp [w3schools.com]
If you look at those usage statistics, Firefox is only a fragment below IE6, and quite a bit above IE7. Of course, I have no way of knowing how accurate these are, but I tend to trust W3 content.
So, when they say that IE "still" has over 60% of the "market share", why does that matter? Usage statistics are the only ones any web developer should care about, I have IE installed,
Re:Ahem... (Score:4, Informative)
Actually a good point (Score:2)
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It is a very good point. It is, by the way, a point the w3schools site makes
W3Schools is a website for people with an interest for web technologies. These people are more interested in using alternative browsers than the average user. The average user tends to use Internet Explorer, since it comes preinstalled with Windows. Most do not seek out other browsers.
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Oh wait, I hear the sound of Microsoft shills and Vista apologists headed this way...
Vista's retail "great success" is almost, but not quite, the same magnitude as W's "Mission Accompl
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Home users have it much worse, home basic and home premium OEM do not come with downgrade rights, neither d
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Firefox is Better (Score:1)
Sigh, if only it were true! (Score:3, Informative)
"It's all integrated
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This option is not available with the standard desktop shortcut to IE due to its unique CLSID. Navigate to iexplore.exe, however, and you can run it as any user that you could run other programs as.
I run Windows XP x64, which comes with both 32-bit and 64-bit versions of IE 6. You can even run both simultaneously, and they don't appear to be interdependent in any way.
This is all well and good, but you're actually right that Internet Explorer 6 is more t
problems with firefox running slowly lately (Score:1)
We've won! (Score:5, Insightful)
Misquoting the Supreme Court, I can't define exactly what that is, but I know it when I see it.
Firefox is a real force in the realm of web browsers. Even if it hovered at 17-18% forever, that would be enough to insure that most websites, and most webapps support Firefox. Even Microsoft's latest web offerings work on Firefox (Windows Live, Silverlight, etc. .
We don't need to dominate the market (OSS). It's nice when we do, but its not necessary. All that is necessary is for OSS software to have enough of a toehold to remain relevant in the minds of web developers. Few companies are willing to discard 1/5-1/6 of their customers.
If Linux could ever get to 15-17% desktop marketshare, we would see tons of Linux games. Not 100% of games would be ported, but many, many games would be.
Gratz Firefox! Gratz Mozilla Foundation! You did it.
Re:We've won! (Score:5, Funny)
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Not to take anything away from the numbers, but .. (Score:2)
Since well over a year now, Firefox by default has been automatically checking for updates and downloading the new version when available on nearly every install. On networks this can be compounded because even if you are not an "Administrator" Firefox will still install download the update although the user cannot install the program. These download numbers are still probably counted.
On the upside, Mozilla does not count the number of installations on GNU/Linux systems (which would probably easily over
That's horrible! (Score:5, Funny)
can we get auto-update numbers? (Score:2)
the clue in in the numbers .. (Score:2)
Internet Explorer 63.9 % - dropped 9.6 %
400,000,000 downloads
Re:slownewsday
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My point was that these figures weren't necessarily relevant, so obviously if you act like they're so relevant.. Plus, why do we even care in the first place, these are nothing but mere web browsers, not a way of life or political parties or whatever.
Us geeks and our 'important' issues...
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IE: 63.85%
Firefox: 22.93%
Safari: 8.14%
Opera: 0.51%
Others:
I know most of that Safari is me