Firefox nears 50 Million Downloads 314
bluephone writes "Firefox hit 49,000,000 downloads last night. Today, as we approach 50,000,000, SpreadFirefox is offering prizes for photographic proof of your most amazing spectacles to celebrate. To quote: 'We have a handful of unique prizes that you won't find anywhere else,
and we're asking you to do one simple thing to claim one: impress us.
As we drive toward 50 million downloads, do something so cool, so
unusual and so spectacular to spread Firefox that we can't help but scurry around the Mozilla Foundation to tell every one.' But you don't have long. The Infocraft Firefox Counter shows just over 800,000 downloads left at the time of this submission!"
Not wanting to be pessimist... (Score:5, Insightful)
Of course, often a download my indicate more than one install: at my parents, I downloaded the program once and installed it on all machines (4 in total)
So, we cannot say much from download numbers about the spread of the program. We still have the risk that we geeks/nerds download it for people and those people stick to IE. Case in point: I'm a teacher and all my pupils use IE. Even though, I always tell them to use Firefox. Why? Don't ask me... I'm only doing this job since january.
Sad... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Firefox and the Slashdot set (Score:3, Insightful)
This is really a great day for open source and Firefox. Hopefully, most of those downloads are being used and not just sitting around (although I suspect that a few people are downloading FF several times).
Re:so what - skype got much more downloads... (Score:4, Insightful)
okay... (Score:3, Insightful)
This article isn't news, and it doesn't really matter. Most /. articles fall into at least one of those categories. Its not like Firefox released a new version, or was offering new services. This article is advertisement encouraging people to visit the website and brand themselves for some 'secret prizes'.
Downloads All Updates? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:When it gets more stable... (Score:5, Insightful)
Oh yeah, that sounds like an objective web page. How much more stable do you need? I only rarely experience problems with firefox, and those typically are attributed to crappy plugin implementations (such as Adobe's PDF Reader - which I've since stopped using, the resource hog it is).
Further, regarding the il rendering of slashdot, maybe if the site code maintainers would update the template to something that actually validates, everything would Just Work. As of now, Slashdot doesn't even validate at HTML 3.2. It includes no character encoding information and the SGML parser on W3 comes up with 114 errors. Maybe they could follow some advice and Retool Slashdot with web standards [alistapart.com].
Re:Firefox and the Slashdot set (Score:2, Insightful)
Download Firefox 1.0, update Firefox to 1.0.1, 1.0.2 and 1.0.3. That's four downloads of the whole package. 50 million/4 = 12,5 million.
It's nice with 12,5 million users, but it's not 50 millions.