Only 25% of Firefox Downloaders Are 'Active Users'

bheer writes "The Guardian points out a page on the Mozilla wiki noting that 'only 50% of the people downloading Firefox actually try it out, and only a further half of those continue to use it actively.' ZDNet has some commentary on the browser's retention rate. While a 25% retention rate isn't necessarily bad, Mozilla is trying to improve these figures with a 12 point plan that includes more TV and media advertising, a better start page and several installation tweaks."

Re:Why download?

[SplatMan_DK]

I use FF myself and love it. And every chance I get, I install it (with permission) on computers belonging to family, friends and business contacts. But I am absolutely sure that not all of them actually use it as their default browser after that. Some of them try it out for a few days, then shift back to IE. And I totally respect that, since having a CHOICE is what really matters. If there are many more like me, we are partially "guilty" of statistics in question. We download FF on many occasions, and not all of these downloads result in an active FF user. - Jesper

I'm not surprised.

[PJ1216]

I put Firefox on my dad's computer. I later went back to it to find he went back to IE. I asked him why and he said it didn't have yahoo.

If these are the kind of people they're losing, I'm not all that upset about it. Too many people assume that their homepage is part of their browser. I tried to explain to him that yahoo only opened up as default on IE because it was set to be his homepage and that I could do the same thing with Firefox. He then made up some excuse that he's fine with IE and doesn't need to change.

So, the two problems Firefox is facing are:

1) Stupid people
2) People feeling they don't *need* to change and therefore use that to say they shouldn't.

Re:That's still a lot

[Stormwatch]

While I use it when I'm on a Windows PC ... I really can't stand it on the Mac

Then you should try Camino. [caminobrowser.org] "Mozilla power, Mac style."

Re:This is SO ironic!!!!

[BenoitRen]

Wasn't Firefox supposed to be the Non-bloated sister of Mozilla?

No. This is popular misinformation. From the Roadmap:

"The goal was, and is not to have more or less features than any other client (Mozilla included) but to have the right set of features to let people get their jobs done."

Mozilla never was bloated, that's something the Firefox fanboys and fangirls made up.

Re:That's still a lot

[Anonymous Coward]

That's not entirely true.

MSN Messenger uses IE when it needs to past things through HTTP POST, eg. to authenticate you as [e-mail] to MSN Spaces. This is necessary because there's no real standard way to pass HTTP POST to the default browser over the command line. I think some other clients have got around this in the past by making a temporary HTML file, having code to send the HTTP POST and then opening that in the default browser. For links in MSN messages, I find they all go the default browser.

Re:Seems fallacious

[Anonymous Coward]

Does firefox report to them when it's being used? I don't think so...

You thought wrong. By default, Firefox phones home at least twice a day.

To see that this is true, go to your about:config and look for things like extensions.blocklist.enabled, extensions.blocklist.interval, and extensions.blocklist.url. Or check out extensions.update.enabled, entensions.update.interval, and extensions.update.url.

Hint: 86400 = 24 * 60 * 60.

Re:That's still a lot

[ozbird]

Rarely if ever needed anymore.

The Vista Hardware Compatibility List [microsoft.com] claims to need IE6 or later; apart from some minor rendering issues, it worked fine with spoofed Firefox. (What kind of moron would make a list IE-only, anyway??)

Re:image resizing

[stonedcat]

I remember it existing at one time..so smeg off.

Ok well it's still not that complex at all:

URL: about:config
type: image_r
set to: false

Step 3: Profit.

Re:That's still a lot

[Bulln-Bulln]

There are some problems with Camino, though, such as Camino having slower release cycles and always being behind the Firefox team.

Camino is not behind. You can download Camino nightlies just like you can download FF nightlies. Both are based on the same code.
The Camino guys just have higher quality standards. IMHO Camino alpha releases are often so good that they could be called final releases.

So, diverting efforts towards the Camino fork

Camino is no fork.

the core issue which is too many unaddressed Mac Firefox bugs. We want a better Firefox, not a neglected Firefox, for OS X.

You won't get it. Live with it. Windows is the top priority for the Mozilla Corp. guys.
The one guy hired by MoCo to work on FF for Mac is currently not working to improve the Mac experience. No, he's working on not sucking even more.
Gecko/Mozilla Plattform 1.9 will use Cairo which up to the latest FF3 alpha works really really bad on Mac OS X. If you think that FF2 has issues on Mac, you should try that alpha release. It's horrible on Mac. You get Aqua buttons but that's about it. I know, it's an alpha and alphas are allowed to suck, but right now the current builds of FF3 don't even display many italic fonts. Think about it: The FF Mac guy works almost exclusively to fix Cario bugs on OSX. He's not working on Keychain integration and so on.
So for the final release we can be lucky if FF3 won't have MORE bugs on OSX than FF2. You can expect that italics will work again, that arabic text will work again, but actual improvements in the Mac departement compared to FF2? I highly doubt it.