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."

RC3 was the same as 2.0

[linuxci]

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.

How about IE7 downloaded as security update?

[Fri13]

IE7 will be installed almoust every windows machine because it will come as security update. Firefox 2.0 will not and is needed to download by user. Like there is many Ubuntu 6.04 users and it seems that firefox 2.0 will not come for those machines as security update. Users would need to update 6.10 version to get it. (or am i very wrong about this? :-D) 2 million downloads is very nice number, if IE7 has got only 3 in 3 days, i think it will be tie, after few days.

Re:A pity.

[linuxci]

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.

I've downloaded both and one is easier

[bgfay]

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.

IE only on english computers

[MadMirko]

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

[teslatug]

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.

Re:Most people don't know IE7 is out

[Anonymous Coward]

I installed IE7 and FF2.0. When IE7 was installed, it did not affect my default browser settings at all (it stayed as Firefox), so that's not a reason to turn off Automatic Updates. In addition, on my Server 2003 box (which got the update via Windows Update), the installer that launches gives you a choice of whether to install IE7, though it obviously strongly encourages you to do so.

As for stable, I doubt IE7 will affect the stability of your system. While I'm sure there are numerous bugs to be discovered, the fact remains that IE7 is designed to avoid a lot of the problems in IE6, by removing some of the close ties with the OS, sandboxing webpages more effectively, etc.

Re:IE only on english computers

[Anonymous Coward]

You can install IE7 in a non-english Windows. You get the English IE7, but you can install it if you want to use it right now.

It still isn't production quality software!

[bradbury]

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:How about IE7 downloaded as security update?

[GIL_Dude]

That 50% number is probably pretty close. I know for us, with 70,000 XP SP2 machines we are concentrating our planning and energy on Vista with Office 2007 and not on updating XP to IE7. Besides, most of our internal websites need updated CSS to render properly in IE7 and it is taking awhile for that to happen. Pushing out IE7 to the users would make them unhappy until the CSS updates get done. That all said, my main machine is Vista with (of course IE7) and Firefox 2.0 (which I am using to write this as I prefer FF - mainly due to adblock).

Re:Most people don't know IE7 is out

[Anonymous Coward]

Ubuntu isn't an OS.

Ubuntu is a distro.

Gnu/Linux is the OS.

Re:RC3 was the same as 2.0

[Anonymous Coward]

No you don't. RC3 was not marked in any way as a release candidate. Only the build date string (20061010) differentiates the different RCs. Just change the name of the installer file and upload it to the main servers and FF2 RC3 becomes FF2.

Re:Most people don't know IE7 is out

[Selanit]

I generally keep IE as the default browser because I get email with links for some admin tasks (approvals) that only work in IE.

You need IE View [mozdev.org]. It's a Firefox extension that adds a new entry to the context menu: "Open link target in IE".

So, your user sends you an approval email, you right click the link and select "Open in IE", and boom. There you go.

Re:Annoyances

[Trentus]

I remember the day I learned to use about:config. I was able to get rid of a couple of simple extensions, and it made me feel like I could make the browser do whatever I wanted.
Some of the ones I use are

*browser.search.openintab true
*browser.search.suggest.enabled false
*network.dns.disableIPv6 true

Some pages were taking a while to load up, but when I disabled IPv6, most pages sped right up. Guess I'll enable it again when more sites use it. As for the search, well, perhaps I'm just particular about this sort of thing, but I don't need any suggestions for my searches, and when I do search, I want it to be in a new tab dammit!

Re:Annoyances

[Trentus]

MozillaZine [mozillazine.org] seem to have a pretty comprehensive list on the about:config entries and possible values. It'd be nice to see a help section on about:config though, and maybe include all the entries in the help file, or at least a link to the MozillaZine page.