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."

image resizing

[Turn-X Alphonse]

Maybe if they didn't hide options to disable stuff like image resizing people wouldn't be annoyed by stuff like that?

My numbers are a bit different.

[Jack9]

I see about 80% retention in the past. Granted I'm in tech, so you might think that geeks usually go for the most reliable technology that offers the best tools and such, but I dont introduce FF to techs...they are already using it. I see about 80% retention from non-techs that I introduced it to. Now that tabbing is a feature of both browsers, 25% still seems very low.

Re:That's still a lot

[jamstar7]

Could be, they're using FF masquaraded as IE to use IE-only sites.

Alright!

[iknownuttin]

Ok. I have Firefox 2.0.0.4. When I first downloaded it, all of a sudden I started getting these "update errors".

Now, being a good F/OSS geek, I went up online to find out WTF the problem was. Well, there was this series of directions to follow. I followed them to the tee. Still nothing. Then I saw a post about my "Firewall" being the problem. Well, I turned it off - no change. BUT, when I was logged in as an Admin, no problem. Interesting. The Firefox folks were insistent that it's my firewall.

So, I went in and gave the Mozilla directory full access rights (this is in Windows XP) and everything is working now.

So, is Firefox on my machine secure?
Would the typical user have to deal with this security problem with IE - (NO)?
How many of you are going to call me or imply that I'm an idiot for not being able to use Firefox correctly?

Users want to know.

Not unusual

[MobyDisk]

I work for a company that offers a downloadable product with a monthly subscription. We find that people actually login, enter their credit card number, download the software, and never run it. There's another group who never click the download button. It's really quite amazing. We've worked hard to make it as easy as possible - make sure the download link is visible on all screen resolutions, browsers, not require scripting or the latest softare, etc.

Re:How do they measure this??

[raju1kabir]

Likewise. I have three laptops here, plus a few virtual machines, all of which are different platforms and so required their own Firefox downloads.

But only one of those gets 95% of the use, the others probably appear to be relatively "inactive". In reality it's because those machines are only used for testing in IE, or surfing on the john, or whatever.

The way I see it...

[enc0der]

After watching my grandparents navigate their computer, I am wondering if 50% of the people that download it can't find where it saved the file and give up in frustration cause they just don't 'get' computers :) Yes, they use AOL as well. I wish I were kidding too, but I'm not. My family (in the past) has used me for tech support, and I was always getting the 'I saved this file but I cannot find it anywhere' and when I showed them, 'hey look, it's on your desktop' they were dumbfounded (as was I in how they lost it). How I solved the problem? I bought macs and told them I didn't know how to use windows anymore :) Of course 'know how' and 'want' are fully interchangeable.

Mom, Pop and Girlfriend Effect

[Steauengeglase]

I can't help but wonder if this comes from the proverbial, "Jimmy" downloading it on his Mom and Dad's computer because they keep complaining about "The Blue E" getting hijacked. Jimmy tells them to, "Click on the Fox", but they keep clicking on "The Blue E" because to them it is, "Getting on the internet." Similar events happen with Jimmy's girlfriend and Boss.

The only other scenario I can think of is that there are a lot of web developers out there who are still trying to get it to work in IE.

Bundle

[sufijazz]

Users are inherently lazy. If you ask them to download a software product and learn to use it, you have already lost a bulk of the potential market share.

The key is to bundle it together. Have Firefox pre-installed on computers. Make is hassle-free for the user. Make it a no-brainer. Dell installing GooglePack (which includes Firefox) on every PC they ship - that's a start. Yahoo messenger downloads should bundle Firefox (side note - this can be installed as an opt-in or opt-out component. While opt-in i.e. checkbox unchecked by default is a more "considerate" option, opt-out is better if you want to increase downloads) In any case, hyperlinks from Yahoo messenger chat windows should open in Firefox windows if FF is installed. Ditto with Trillian.

Yes, this is a sort of militant technique (the same technique that MS used to make IE a monopoly). But let's face it - it's not the geeks but the users who don't know about FF that need FF most because they are most vulnerable to the security cracks in IE.

Some other things they can do: bundle the most useful extensions with the product (Map This, AdBlock, Fetch text URL, DictionarySearch, BugMeNot, SearchPluginHacks), reduce the memory it hogs, interactive tutorial. They need to get out of the "of the geeks, by the geeks, for the geeks" mentality.

How many CC bounces do you get?

[megaditto]

What you are seeing could be criminals testing the stolen credit card numbers (to see which ones are still valid before making a large purchase). This happens to be a huge problem for sites such as redcross.org requiring designated abuse teams.

My company is part of the 75%. FIX THE MEMORY LEAK

[Anonymous Coward]

Our IT manager is a real big Firefox fan, and requires Firefox to be on all of our images. But almost no one in the company uses it.

The developers all have 2GB machines, but Firefox has such bad memory leaks that it ALWAYS end up causing our systems to thrash madly. We only launch firefox to debug webpages now (Firebug is second to none in page debugging), and leave it closed otherwise.

The non development machines only have 1GB of RAM, and it's simply impossible to use Firefox on them without closing it every 6 hours, because it causes the system to thrash so badly since it typically consumes over 50% of the memory.

Please don't blame it on the plugins. I did a scientific test at home, and used Firefox 2.0 for 4 months without installing a single plugin. I would have to close it every single night due to its horrible memory leaks. One time it even got up to 1.4 GIGABYTES of memory usage. Yes, you read that right. 1.4 GIGABYTES. I had 6 tabs open, and when I closed them all and went to www.google.com, the memory didn't go down. In fact the memory usage went UP by 2-3 megs each time I closed a tab. How does that make any sense.

Anyway, I waited overnight, with one tab open to google... memory usage did not decrease at all. That, my friends, is called a memory leak.

I hear all this stuff about how Firefox is working on new cutting-edge features for 3.0... but whenever I bring up the memory leak problem, I'm always told one of a few things.

1) It's the plugins, stupid!! (proven wrong with a plugin-free test.)
2) Buy more RAM, it's cheap (that's a stupid solution.)
3) There's no memory leak (The wikipedians insist this is true. Every time I add anything about the horrible memory leak to wikipedia, they say it's FUD and that I must work for Microsoft since I'm insulting their precious browser)
4) Internet Explorer hides its memory usage in the kernel, it uses 10x as much memory as Firefox! (Prove it.)

So, anyway:

Firefox, if you don't fix your damned memory leak problem, I'm going to keep using IE7.

Re:That's still a lot

[Eddi3]

With a simple Google Search [google.com]:

http://www.openaddict.com/ie_reject.html [openaddict.com]
http://www.devin.com/ie_reject.shtml [devin.com]
http://www.findsimon.com/ie_reject.html [findsimon.com]
http://www.trojanpony.co.uk/ie_reject.html [trojanpony.co.uk]
http://doli.ic.cz/ie_reject.php [doli.ic.cz]

Just to name a few.

Eddie

Re:That's still a lot

[Curtman]

FF on XP does a pretty good job of integrating into the OS

When you click a link in an MSN conversation, it opens in IE regardless of what your preferred browser setting is. Most people that I know begin their web browsing by clicking on the MSN link to open Hotmail, and they get IE. When that changes those numbers will look better. I'm afraid it will take a court ruling to change that though.

Stupid is hereditary, you get it from your kids

[SmallFurryCreature]

But yes, I agree, people are reluctant to change. I recently had to deal with a non-geeks computer... *pauzes while the slashdot audience groans ssympathetically* who kept installing crap software including spyware, trojans etc etc. The guy is also poor so his old computer grinds to a halt pretty damn fast whenever he installed the latest crap again. Offcourse he uses IE and was extremely reluctant to change. He was used to IE and that was what he used and therefore was going to use.

The cure? Well A: I told him that firefox would stop all the crap that got onto his computer B: the only remedy I offered was for him to re-install windows XP (no service pack) again and let it patch to service pack 2.

Cruel, I know especially on AMD from the P3 era with 128mb of memory, but hey, he finally got the message after the Xth install and having to buy a new HD (actually the old one was fine but he got one so messed up that he thought it was broken and who am I to correct a IE user?)

Finally now he is using FF and his comp hasn't had to re-install in a while. It is amazing to see how much you can harm even Windows XP (which I have to admit as a linux user is not as crap as windows used to be) when the user will click on anything that comes his way. It is sometimes humbling to have to rememeber that people do not only SEE those banners "you are infected" (by the way, I seem to have missed that story about how the web switched payed by advertising to the current model) but actually click on them and install any software that they find.

Constantly helping these people out does NOT force them to learn from their mistakes. Most people like to be helpfull, but perhaps you should take the role of your own parents at times and just let those people make their own mistakes, force them to deal with it on their own and hope they learn. You can run along your kid while they are learning to ride their bike, but if you are still doing that when they are 21, you might not actually be helping them.

Do NOT become an overprotective carebear. If your father does NOT want to use firefox, then fine let him deal with his computer problems (if he even has any, you don't say so).

People hate pushy people. So do NOT push firefox on people.