Only 25% of Firefox Downloaders Are 'Active Users' 294
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."
Why download? (Score:3, Insightful)
How do they measure this?? (Score:5, Insightful)
Download once, use many (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:That's still a lot (Score:5, Insightful)
Think about what the internet was like in 2002, when Mozilla 1.0 was first released. We encountered IE-only sites daily, Safari didn't exist, and MSIE definitively dominated the web landscape. Anyone complaining to a bank or power company about a Mozilla problem just claimed to be using Netscape -- the Gecko browser people had actually heard of -- and rarely got anywhere. Those of us using Mozilla preferred it for a variety of reasons, and hoped for wider adoption so that our preferred browser would receive acceptable support from webmasters.
Today, Firefox is a decidedly mainstream browser, listed on most "supported browser" lists, and Firefox-only sites are about as common now as the remaining IE-only sites. Do we need more adoption? If Firefox is serving its existing users well, is it worth the cost of an advertising blitz to capture a few more?
Re:Why download? (Score:5, Insightful)
Back to the average Joe, they do this way more often then us. They get the link to download for whatever reason and download it with good intention, but not everyone installs it. Of those that do install, they try to use it, realize it is too different or whatever and go back to IE without bothering to uninstall... that is not important to them. To them, having 100 programs installed is the same as 1 - they know no better.
If you realize that you, being a slashdot reading computer user, are not the "average computer user" then you may be able to put these numbers into perspective and understand how they came to be.
Re:Why download? (Score:5, Insightful)
I'd bet some people are downloading the installer, lose it, and just never bother to find it.
Re:Download once, use many (Score:3, Insightful)
If you have a home computer, and the user downloads firefox and keeps using it, you have a long-term usage ratio of 100% per download.
If a sysadmin downloads a single copy of firefox, installs it on 10 computers, and 3 long-term users develop out of that, you then have a 300% ratio per download. However, you only have a 30% ratio per installation. One download, 10 installs, 3 users.
This is SO ironic!!!! (Score:2, Insightful)
It seems that Mozilla is "finally get it", and in the process, going against some of the things that the OSS community generally detests. I'll comment on their 12-step program (just the ones i find interesting):
1. Change Firefox icon label to closer resemble action of getting to web
Wow! They finally realized that the name "Firefox" doesn't make ANY connection to the internet for standard users.
2. Force the Firefox icon to easier to find location
ha! They're going to load down systems with icons to Firefox EVERYWHERE on a person's machine. I guess they figured they'd follow the lead of Real Player.....everyone loves how the real player icons show up everywhere.
7. Make common plug-ins work out of the box
In other words...they're going to consider Firefox to be "Firefox plus the top few plug-ins as a package", at least for comparison purposes and feature lists. Wasn't Firefox supposed to be the Non-bloated sister of Mozilla? Someone's lost their way.
9. Make the web feel more human
Let's add a bunch of eye-candy to use up CPU cycles of all these Dual-Core processors! Why not, people like Vista!
11. Stickier start page
We're going to make it hard to change your start page, you know...like MSN
Re:That's still a lot (Score:3, Insightful)
a) Rarely if ever needed anymore. (For IE only sites, spoofing probably won't make that ActiveX control work anyways)
and b) The day where most FF users were that technically inclined have passed. Average joe's using FF would have no idea that could even be done. (Or care...see a )
Re:That's still a lot (Score:2, Insightful)
Opera troll (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Alright! (Score:4, Insightful)
Those who don't login as an administrator either know what they're doing (and therefore have the skills to understand the problem), or they're a large enough business that their IT department should be familiar with problems like this. Firefox is hardly the only program that expects to be able to write to it's program directory, which isn't allowed by normal users.
Now, logically, since you are a technical user, and set your primary account as a normal user, you should know that normal users can't write to %ProgramFiles%. Therefore when you attempt to run an update, that you know damn well requires writing files out to %ProgramFiles%, you shouldn't be surprised to see problems or errors.
Instead of giving your normal user account full access to the program directory, you should maintain security and install updates after logging in as an administrator. The normal user can see when an update is available, which gives you the push to login as an administrator and install it, but obviously the normal user shouldn't be able to do it.
That everyone pointed to every other problem under the sun instead of this illustrates the overwhelming number of Windows users who run as administrator. I've got a couple dozen programs installed that refuse to run if the logged in account isn't an administrator. At least Firefox manages functions just fine for everything except program updates.
Re:Opera troll (Score:3, Insightful)
The plugin gripe is point 7 of the 12-point plan:
7. Make common plug-ins work out of the box
Isn't the purpose of giving users non-admin accounts on computers, though, to prevent them from doing things such as installing unauthorized applications? Anyway, if you want to run Firefox on a machine without authorization, just use Portable Firefox [portableapps.com]. If you want to install applications on your own computer, I would expect you would login as an admin.