Firefox 2 Downloads Top 2 million in 24 Hours 295
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."
And what about RC3 Downloads? (Score:3, Interesting)
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- An RC3 user
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Or as a serious guyss, 2,050,000. I mean, come on guys. How many people really downloaded RC3? Or use Ubuntu? When we're talking about downloads in the millions, we're talking about what normal people are doing. The stats of nerds don't significantly contribute.
RC3 was the same as 2.0 (Score:5, Informative)
So people with RC3 don't count in these stats unless they didn't realise and downloaded 2.0 again.
The one feature that makes it worth the download.. (Score:4, Interesting)
Plus, it's a relatively trim download, so cheers to the dev team for that.
Re:The one feature that makes it worth the downloa (Score:2, Interesting)
It gives options for firebox and Fire fox.
There are other oddities in this dictionary which will no doubt be ironed out.
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The outstripping won't last long (Score:2)
As soon as Microsoft Update downloads and installs IE7 [microsoft.com] on every Windows machine with automatic updates enabled, this race will be over.
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Msie 7.0 105535 hits 4.1 %
Firefox 2.0 6694 hits 0.2 %
Firefox 1.5.0.7 96935 hits 3.8 %
Stats are for the last few days, since FF 2.0 was out.
Being an online banking site, I figure the users are as "Joe six-pack" or "My Grandma" or "Insert home user stereotype here" as they get. I wish Microsoft was holding off another month because I would LOVE to see how this plays out when people have to take extra effor
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Btw. Ubuntu was recently updated to 6.10 version, with Firefox 2.0 included. I got my Firefox from there and I supposed that doesn't count.
I've downloaded both and one is easier (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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Wait... let's see if I got this straight. You want Firefox to come with a spyware-like function that reports back whenever it's installed?
Yup, that'll go far in convincing the crowd that Firefox is more secure than the Microsoft alternative!
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Of course... (Score:2)
whats the fuss about (Score:3, Funny)
It's "better" but nothing much over 1.5.x (Score:2)
The GTK matching on Linux is not very good, with glitches surrounding button sizes and positioning of text (the new "add ons" combi-dialog is horrible) and with strange button focusing.
One thing I will say for it is it does seem a bit zippier than 1.5.x, but I suspect I wi
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When I saw how awful the FF 2.0 default theme was (refresh? ugh!) I went out and found Qute again, and remembered what it was like to actually enjoy looking at my web browser again.
stats from firefox site prob don't include ubuntu (Score:2)
Nothing unexpected (Score:3, Insightful)
The point is : do theses guys use IE as their main browser ? No.
Are they using Firefox as their main browser ? The majority of them does.
Therefore they are more likely to get Firefox 2.0 than IE7 (although many of them will get both in case they stumble upon a IE-only website). So its absolutly normal that the initial rush is in favor of Firefox...In the same way that Firefox's RC were more used than IE7's RC. Actually if Firefox had a lower download rush i would have quite worried for them.
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IE only on english computers (Score:3, Informative)
I wouldn't jump to conclusions right now, you might be embarrassed later.
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Issues in Edgy. (Score:2)
Unfortunatly I've had some issues with it. Perhaps it's Ubuntus fault, but still. It's issues with FF for me.
https://launchpad.net/distros/ubuntu/+source/firef ox/+bug/68586 [launchpad.net]
That's one. The browser just "closes" on some pages. That's the major one actually.
Also, they've changed so that ctrl-tab no longer switches tab (in kubuntu) but changes virtual des
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I will say that Edgy Eft has given me more trouble than any earlier version of Ubuntu (enough so that I'm thinking of moving to Gentoo), but Firefox is one thing that is working as expected.
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Actually, it's kinda cool to poke around the keyboard shortcuts - there are windows and functions I never knew existed before, just a keyboard shortcut away. I should let my 4-year-old use my computer more often - he's a master at discovering
Languages and piracy stop IE7 (Score:2)
And then the IE7 install checks if your computer is a legal XP copy. But most of desktop users j
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Do you have any figures to back up that assertion? I likewise assert that the vast majority of desktop users have perfectly legal copies of Windows, as they simply use whatever came with their PC when they bought it, and that likewise the majority of users buy their PCs from big-name shops/manufacturers that install correctly licenced copies.
Office and other apps, now that's a different story. As everyone here keeps saying, though, most users couldn't in
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You seem mighty sure about that.
But XP has been the default OEM system install for five years. The gold standard for end users. XP upgrade bundles haven't slipped far down the software sales charts.
The truth, I suspect, is that there are a lot more legit XP installs out there than the Geek is willing to admit.
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Of course there are. Think about it - most users are barely able to secure their machines, even though all it really takes is installing some av software, not switching off its auto-update feature, and installing Windows updates fromtime to time (which is also fully automated by default).
Are we really exepcted to believe that these same people are able to not only obtain an illicit copy of XP and
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1) The poll says 39.5% of respsondents are running an illegal copy of Windows; that's not "almost half" of Dutch geeks, it's not even almost half of Dutch geeks that run Windows
2) The original assertion was that most copies of Windows on the desktop are illicit; geeks most certainly do not make up the majority of desktop users
I stand by my assertion that the majority of desktop users do not have the technical skills nor contacts required to install an illicit copy of Windows.
Upgrade vs. switch (Score:2)
Annoyances (Score:5, Informative)
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:
display: none !important;
}
Feel free to add your own to the thread.
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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 sor
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"2 million ... using Firefox 2 ... first 24 hours" (Score:2)
The full quote is "Firefox 2: 2 million (actually slightly more) people using Firefox 2 in the first 24 hours."
This is, unfortunately, an uncited statistic that is much more vague than "X downloads in the first 24 hours." How are the number of users tracked? What constitutes a user? Are people using Alphas, Betas, and RCs counted in this statistic (the vagueness of the wording implies yes to at least RC3).
It still isn't production quality software! (Score:4, Informative)
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-requi
Re:It still isn't production quality software! (Score:4, Insightful)
I won't comment on how you use your browser. But here's a question, is there ANY browser that would be able to handle the stress tests you used?
If there is another browser that can handle "hundreds" of open sessions, and still work well for you, then perhaps that is a better fit for your purposes.
Otherwise you're pushing your browser to the extremes, then pointing out its faults, however nothing else can handle it either.
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First off, almost nothing gracefully handles memory allocation failure. Particularly anything in C/C++. You need memory to complete an operation, and if you don't get it, you're screwed. There's no way to reliably unwind the stack and reverse the state of the program to continue without perform
Win98 75Mhz 132MB? (Score:2)
Thanks for the tip, hehe.
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No way I will dl ie7 on an important machine (Score:2)
IE 6 works fine for sites that have been designed as it is the only browser in existance, which still exists. Hosing IE 6 with IE 7 is the stupidest thing anyone could do, considering that firefox/opera are at least as good.
I may wait for a 2.01 firefox, but there's no question what my main browser will be.
People who say downloads != users (Score:2)
an annoying change they made (Score:2)
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Above should read "The menus in 2.0 in linux are now using <alt> instead of <control>"
BBC Browser Poll (Score:2)
Don't bother, here's the first 5 minutes buglist (Score:2)
2. Find "^F" in Firefox 2.0 does not appear to work, text is entered in the Find area bottom-left but no page motion happens, queries that do not match text on the given page are not marked in red, etc.
3. Only the first tab works. You can open a second and more tab, but you can't load files int
Re:Don't bother, here's the first 5 minutes buglis (Score:2)
I've noticed this as well.
Which compiler was used? (Score:2)
Is the current FF compiled with the Intel compiler? If not, are there any projects that compile stuff like FF, Videolan etc on the Intel compiler? I remember a project that was trying to compile the linux kernel using the ICC, but was failing. If Intel releases a gcc-compatible compiler for win32, we should
Got Firefox 2.0 - More Sites Than Ever Don't Work (Score:2)
When the hell are Web sites going to start following standards? I don't care if they don't obey copyright law - I just want them to work with my preferred browser.
Fortunately I just discovered at least one of them works with Kongueror - so at least I don't have to boot into Windows to use the site. OTOH, if I just click the links, they open in Firefox - so I have to tell Kongueror to "Open in a new tab".
I had to download it six times... (Score:2)
Re:But who needs to download IE? (Score:5, Funny)
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How about IE7 downloaded as security update? (Score:2, Informative)
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IE7 will be installed almoust every windows machine because it will come as security update.
Thus far, IE requires a "genuine" version of Windows to install, so it certainly isn't going to be delivered like that.
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And lastly all those that have an old system with pre-win2000 versions just can't get any update from MS.
And many organizations seems willing to block the install of IE7.
So not all windows users will get IE7. I don't have any
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So much for the American consumer making educated choices in the marketplace, (an alledged keystone of American Capitalism; the type of Capitalism we want to seed in the developing world.)
Ban advertising?! (Score:2, Funny)
It's a good thing we know what's best for them!
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How many Windows installs were installed in 2 days when Win98 was released?
That was 8 years ago and people were desperate to get off of 95. In converting to human terms it happened in the 1800's. Or at least last century - litterally. Second point, I bet it costs a lot less! Next, didn't even have to leave my seat and upgraded in seconds including download time. A whole lot less painful than Windows 98 or IE updates.
BTW, the new 2.0 version looks good.
Re:But who needs to download IE? (Score:4, Insightful)
That was 8 years ago and people were desperate to get off of 95.
No, they weren't. Indeed, the take-up of Windows 98 could only be described - generously - as "sluggish".
Slashdot, at the time, was overjoyed at how poorly received Windows 98 was, considering it another sign of Microsoft's downfall and using it as another example of how Linux on everyone's desktop was only 12 months away...
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Can't speak for anyone else, of course, but personally, that was due to my Windows installation at the time being Windows 95c, whose only major difference to 98, as far as I could tell at the time, was that 98 had integrated Internet Explorer into itself. So I wasn't desperate at all to get rid of 95c. In fact, I don't think I ever had a 98 installation... I just went to 2k as soon as that was out. Now
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I for one welcome anything that provides a choice, especially when it comes to microsofts dominance.
I'm not a member of the "Microsoft is evil" club but I do think that their market share is certainly not based on the merits of their quality products.
poor math skills among windows admins (Score:2)
So what the hell happened to all the fuss? (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re:Most people don't know IE7 is out (Score:5, Insightful)
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Once Windows automatically downloads IE7 next month, then compare downloads. IE7's stats will skyrocket next month when it's deployed to home users. (Most companies are delaying the roll-out for additional testing. So expect usage rates to slowly increase over the next year.)
Knowing Microsoft they timed this so that they could be the last in and change the default browser back to IE.
Time for me to turn off automatic updates so that my only XP system is (relatively) stable. (others are 2 solaris, 3 Suse,
Re:Most people don't know IE7 is out (Score:5, Interesting)
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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:A pity. (Score:4, Informative)
Re:A pity. (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Well, how many UNINSTALLED IT? (Score:5, Insightful)
Most people actually use Firefox without extensions and by default it's a lot more featureful than IE6 and about as featureful as IE7 some people say too much was put in 2.0. You can't please everybody so instead of putting everything under the sun like Seamonkey (the Mozilla suite) or Opera they've decided on the options that are of most use to the most people and allowed others to add the extra features.
Also worth noting is that bugfix support for 1.5 will continue for a while so you can keep using it to wait for all your extensions to be compatible with the new version.
Also, there's choice in the market if Firefox is not for you. I personally prefer Firefox to Opera, but Opera is a good browser and it's worth trying it may suit your needs better.
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I would really like to see the Mozilla Foundation employing the authors of the most popular extensions and make them official so that they'd be ready by every release.
For some people extensions are the biggest selling point of Firefox.
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oh, bye bye karma.
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If you got the notion (Score:2)
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It's a pretty nice theme for mac, I think it makes firefox look like one of the nicest browsers on the platform. The new default firefox 2.0 theme looks like ass. Whoever signed off on the changes needs to be shot.
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Only those people running Windows. I wonder what the proportions of the firefox 2 downloads were for the different operating systems.
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Re:Download both (Score:4, Funny)
They replied with a Word document.
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Even though I know those sites actually exist, I spend most of my life browsing the web (part of my job, in fact) with Firefox, and I almost never encounter Firefox-specific problems. Any respectable website (except Marlboro [marlboro.com] maybe) follows basic standards well enough these days. Even horribly random sites such as MySpace or hi5 work on Firefox just fine.
I downloaded IE7, but mostly out of curiosity, and because, again, my job is heavily Internet-related. I only use it when I need to download an XPI from ce
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No Firefox auto update from 1.5 to 2.0 (Score:2)
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There are no new updates available. Firefox may check periodically for new updates
See http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?t=476
(You may have trouble accessing the page. Since 2.0 was released, the forums have been slowwwww.)
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So for me it's a no-brainer, I only downloaded what is best.
Re:To be fair... (Score:4, Insightful)
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That makes these statistics pretty interesting, because when these statistics were collected, neither IE 6 nor Firefox 1.x had either of their respective update services (Windows vs Firefox's update-on-launch thing) active, so the results shouldn't have been skewed. The only skewing I can see is that Firefox's users are generally more technically minded and more likely to care for their browser to be updated.
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