Firefox Downloads Reach 75 Million

WindozeSux writes "Today Mozilla Firefox has reached its 75 millionth download. The Mozilla staff find this a morale booster since recent security vulnerabilities have slightly lowered the browser's growth rate. 'We're beefing up the management on the project. The project is still very healthy. We're seeing continued corporate interest and have a lot of large organizations that want to do deployments,' said Chris Hoffman."

Re:Diversity and competition is the Important Thin

[SimilarityEngine]

I sincerely hope so, because I'm well and truly sick of this sort of situation [bbc.co.uk].

The competition isn't coming.

[Ckwop]

And guess what, Firefox is going to keep growing! Why? Because IE7 is a rubbish. Before you mod this flamebait, let me explain why. Here [ckwop.me.uk] is a screenshot of IE7 beta. Examine it closely. Here are my issue with it:

1. Where the fuck is the refresh button? After ten minutes you work out it's the little button next to the right of the URL entry bit.
2. Why is the menu Below the tabs. I find this inconsistent and confusing. Worst of all, there's no way to put it in it's proper position.
3. Have Microsoft dropped it's entire design team, the tabs look simply awful. That little grey bit to the right of the tabs allows you to create a new tab by clicking on it. That's fairly cool, but holy shit it just looks wrong.
4. The home icon on the left hand side of the screen is in that default position, unexpanded, where did my Favourites go or everything else go?
5. If this is it, what took so freaking long?

Seriously, this looks like it was designed by an amateur software development team. This is meant to be the Firefox killer? Firefox is showing that a monopoly doesn't guarentee you a browser monopoly. Is IE7 going to stop the rot? I doubt it very much. Firefox looks and feels better. Hats off to the Firefox team.

Simon.

Re:Can Firefox be marketed?

[BlueLightning]

Well, there is the Mozilla ActiveX project [www.iol.ie]. You can embed the Mozilla ActiveX control into any application to add built-in browsing functionality, just like you can with the IE one (shdocvw).

XUL

[Trevelyan]

Firefox is built on xul, so any os that runs firefox can run your xul app.
http://www.mozilla.org/projects/xul/ [mozilla.org]
http://www.xulplanet.com/ [xulplanet.com]

Also as to components you can use in your apps. There is the render engine:
http://www.mozilla.org/newlayout/ [mozilla.org]
http://www.mozilla.org/projects/embedding/GRE.html [mozilla.org]
Or the script engine, rhino
http://www.mozilla.org/rhino/ [mozilla.org]

Re:Can Firefox be marketed?

[MarkByers]

I use Firefox on most of my computers, so I'm responsible for about 5 of those 75 million downloads. 30, if they are counting each patch too.

Don't worry... If you use the built-in update feature of Firefox, your security upgrades are not counted in the total number of downloads. Only downloads via the website are counted.

Re:The competition isn't coming.

[OverlordQ]

1-5) Everything is movable . . . see that little grey thing at the left side . . click it and move it . . it's been like that since IE5

Re:It's a big number.

[MarkByers]

Actually if you use portage I think it probably would be counted, since the ebuild downloads it from Mozilla (that being the standard way to get source/binary packages in an ebuild - from the maker).

It's true for portage as well. Gentoo uses a system of mirrors so that when you download the source it will try to fetch it from a mirror rather than going to the main site. Watch the screen carefully when you install:

emerge --fetchonly mozilla-firefox
>>> Downloading http ://distfiles.gentoo.org/distfiles/firefox-1.0.6-so urce.tar.bz2

Firefox market share and versions

[webplay]

Latest data on Firefox market share and versions from a popular (100,000+ unique visitors/day) general-interest site I own, collected in the last 2 days:

Share of pageviews (including robots): 12.3%
Share of pageviews (excluding robots): 13.0%

Most popular versions:
1.7.8 on XP: 23%
1.7.10 on XP: 20%
1.7.5 on XP: 12%
1.7.2 on XP: 5%
1.7.8 on NT: 5%
1.7.x on OS X: 4%
1.7.7 on XP: 4%
1.7.9 on XP: 3%
1.4 on XP: 2%
1.7.3 on XP: 2%
1.7.10 on NT: 2%
1.7.5 on NT: 1%
1.7 on XP: 1%
1.7.8 on Win 98: 1%
1.7.6 on NT: 1%
1.7.10 on Win 98: 1%
1.7.10 on Linux: 1%

Firefox users running the latest version: ~25%

Re:relevance

[A beautiful mind]

It's important to note, that the counter DOES NOT count if it detects a download from a firefox browser (user_agent), so generally the firefox update stuff doesn't count...

Isn't it... normal?

[vitaly.friedman]

Actually, the fact that Mozilla has become so popular doesn't surprise me. In Germany over 20% (!) of Internet-users browse through the Net with the Mozilla Browser, each and every one of my co-workers (web-development) uses Mozilla, Greasemonkey scripts and all the other stuff which makes the life of web-users easier contribute to such an enormous development of Mozilla. I wonder, how much time will pass by until IE will lose its dominant position on the "browser-market".

Vitaly Friedman, Saarbruecken, Germany

Re:Perspective

[Anonymous Coward]

Firefox has been downloaded 75 million times. Many of these were upgrades from previous versions, which had already been counted.

The count doesn't include upgrades downloaded through the Firefox 'software update' function, only those downloaded by clicking on the download link (I'm not sure if that's what you were saying but it comes up every time we talk about Firefox download counts on slashdot, so I thought I might as well clarify).

The counter also excludes downloads made directly from ftp.mozilla.org, I think, and obviously it excludes RPM/deb/tgz packages shipped by Linux distros.

Re:The competition isn't coming.

[Antony.S]

"FYI, the menu bar is below the tab bar so it can stay contextual to the document being viewed in that tab, be it a PDF, a Word document or an Excel sheet. It's a simple switch that affords a great increase in versatility with no practical downsides, and you're knocking it simply because firefox does it differently and you don't like the look of it? Bitch please."

What the fuck? Firefox does it differently? The entire Microsoft product line since Windows 95 does it different.

Re:The competition isn't coming.

[AntipodeanJim]

Ckwop wrote:

3. Have Microsoft dropped it's entire design team, the tabs look simply awful. That little grey bit to the right of the tabs allows you to create a new tab by clicking on it. That's fairly cool, but holy shit it just looks wrong.

Just FYI, because I discovered this by accident in Firefox: if you double click an empty spot on the tabs bar, you'll open up a new blank tab.

Re:relevance

[Anonymous Coward]

It's important to note, that the counter DOES NOT count if it detects a download from a firefox browser (user_agent)

+3 Informative, but wrong, I'm afraid. The counter doesn't count software update-triggered downloads, true, but it does count direct downloads from Firefox UAs through the 'Download' link on mozilla.org.

Re:Diversity and competition is the Important Thin

[Baricom]

Are you sure IE is rendering in standards-compliant* mode? I discovered that it's really easy to knock IE back into quirks mode with things as simple as a XML declaration. After I tracked down what IE was choking on, I was able to create a valid XHTML Strict document that IE likes, too.

*IE's standards-compliant mode isn't, but at least it doesn't have the box model bug.

Re:Perspective

[ziggamon2.0]

Well, actually, no... First of all, as has been said approximately 75 million times, no, the upgrades are NOT included. Not included. No. 75 million is a good approximation on the number of users Firefox has, although it has both false positives (redownloading) and false negatives (one download, many installs, linux users, etc). 75 million is the only number we have and it's about right.

500 million songs is downloaded songs. Not downloads of iTunes. It's very probable that the average user has downloaded more than 6,67 (500/75) songs each, which would make Firefox more popular than iTunes.

Now consider that Firefox still has some kind of "scary open source thing only for nerds, why would I need it when IE works prefectly fine" ring to it's name, and iTunes is just "Look ma, I'm downloading songs legally", I'd say that the Firefox 75 million number is pretty darn impressive!

Re:I use Firefox! Why?

[zerocool^]

You need to dumb it down.

When I tell people they need to use firefox, and they ask why?, this is my answer:

If you use firefox, you'll get less spyware. Spyware comes from 2 sources: downloading it on purpose, and through bugs in internet explorer. Since IE is tied in so closely with windows, any time there's a bug, it usually leaks over into windows, and that's how they get spyware on your system. If you use firefox, it's just a program. I think it has less bugs in it, but even if it does have bugs, they're less likely to get into windows.
So, 1.) Don't download weather bug or screen savers, etc, because a lot of times, spyware piggybacks on them, and 2.) Use firefox.

It's technical enough to get across the point that there's a lot of shit going on in the background that they don't need to know about, but it's simple enough that any moron can understand it, and still feel like they know something special, something l33t about computers.

~Will

Re:Firefox market share and versions

[baadger]

For those confused by parents version numbers, Firefox actually contains the Mozilla version number (and rightly so).

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7.9) Gecko/20050711 Firefox/1.0.5

Measuring statistics on the Gecko/Mozilla engine just makes more sense than tagetting Firefox version numbers.

Re:Can Firefox be marketed?

[ImaLamer]

Currently you can't deploy Firefox in the enterprise and lock down its features and settings, but that is expected in 1.5. The basic rendering engine [mozilla.org] of the Mozilla browser Gecko [wikipedia.org] is used all over in browsers (Wikipedia's list):

• Mozilla Application Suite [wikipedia.org] - Mozilla the web browser, mail client, etc*
• Mozilla Firefox [wikipedia.org] - The mentioned applications, never browse the web without it*
• AOL [wikipedia.org] for Mac OS X uses Gecko, why doesn't AOL for Windows is the eternal question.
• Aphrodite [mozdev.org]* Renegade project working on UI tweaks
• Beonex Communicator [wikipedia.org]* - Another option to Mozilla, cross platform
• Camino [wikipedia.org] for Mac OS X, Mozilla project for OSX
• CompuServe [wikipedia.org] 7.0 for Windows and Mac OS X (The now AOL service)
• DocZilla [wikipedia.org] for Windows and Linux, SGML [wikipedia.org]/XML [wikipedia.org]/HTML [wikipedia.org] web browser [wikipedia.org].
• Epiphany [wikipedia.org] for GNU/Linux (Default Gnome browser)
• Galeon [wikipedia.org] for Linux (Old Default Gnome browser)
• IBM [wikipedia.org] Web Browser for OS/2 [wikipedia.org]*
• Kazehakase [wikipedia.org] for Linux is a more featured browser, plans more...
• ManyOne [wikipedia.org]* 3D browser?
• Minimo [wikipedia.org] (web browser for small devices)
• Netscape [wikipedia.org] 6.0 and later versions* (of course)

And in other applications (like):
ActiveState Komodo [wikipedia.org] (visual development environment for Perl [wikipedia.org], Python [wikipedia.org] and more on Windows and Linux) [4] [activestate.com] The Liferea [wikipedia.org] (news aggregator [wikipedia.org] for Linux), The Mozilla ActiveX Control [wikipedia.org] (allows ActiveX [wikipedia.org] developers to easily embed Gecko in applications) The Mozilla Calendar [wikipedia.org] (calendar and personal information manager)* The Mozilla Thunderbird [wikipedia.org] The (email [wikipedia.org]/newsgroup [wikipedia.org] client and news aggregator)* Nvu [wikipedia.org] (a web authoring application)* and Gecko# for Windows (.NET Binding for Gecko)

* Also uses Gecko to render its entire user interface via XUL.

You can either choose to adopt the rendering engine for your own applications or hopefully in the future deploy it with rights management. Personally, I think that personalized installations are the next needed step. If admins can roll out Firefo