Mozilla has passed the 200 millionth download of Firefox, and has taken the opportunity to thank its most fervent fans for their work in supporting the open-source Web browser.
On the SpreadFirefox Website Monday, Mozilla developer and community coordinator Asa Dotzler thanked the “tens of thousands” of affiliate members who use “buttons, banners, and links to spread the word about Firefox.”
Although the 200 million download mark doesn’t translate into that number of users — some have downloaded multiple versions, others canceled the download, still others downloaded but don’t regularly use Firefox — Mozilla’s Firefox has acquired about 15 percent of the global usage share in the nearly 21 months since it was released. In the same time span, Microsoft’s Internet Explorer saw its share drop from the high 90s to just under 80 percent.
Everyone involved with the tech world knows that the Firefox market share is much higher than this — among folks who know how to use something other than the browser that came with the box.
The best way for them to thanks us for using their browser is to make it harder for GAIN (the ones who own Gator software) and other spyware companies to attach their “products” to it.
PLUS IT WOULD BE A GOOD IDEA TO MAKE GMAIL WORK WITH IT IN THE SAME WAY IT WORKS ON IE.
Problem with that is that MS has made propritary builds of the Internet softwares. It dont RUN on the same standards as the Original software, like JAVA, ACTIVEX, SQL, HTML, and all the rest.
Complain to GMAIL.
I probably have 20 downloads by myself.
I downloaded and used Firefox for about 3 months, I have since returned to Internet Explorer. Firefox is way toomemory hungry and would bog down my systems. Internet Explorer is way faster and less of a resource hog on my systems.
As for the security Implications, with proper attention to updates configuration and simple common sense Internet Explorer can be made very secure. It is unfortunate that Microsoft does not make several changes to the install defaults to ensure the system is more locked down out of the Box without making extensive changes to configuration to improve security.
Just something as simple as having Internet Explorer run as a lower priveledged account by default would help alot. Perhaps now that Microsoft has purchased Winternals they could use the technology in Sysinternal’s “PsExec” program to have Internet Explorer by default run with limited user rights by default reguardless of if the user is administrator or not.
I am thinking I will Give the Firefox version 2 a try again to see if they have finally got a handle on the memory and resouce hogging of Firefox.
Angel I’m not sure what the issue is as I haven’t used IE at home since I’ve been on GM but have you looked at this?
https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/173/
I agree with the memory concerns, though the other features and improvements outway that for me… I would like the memory gobbling nature to be toned down.
I use Firefox, more for the tabbed browsing than for any other reason. IE can be tied down, and I always connect with a limited account (when I remember). Opera’s got all that weird crap going on (ads, etc), Maxthon isn’t quite ready for prime time and since AOL corrupted Netscape I won’t even install it. It could be just me, but it seems IE tends to render my html/css visions a little closer to true than Firefox.
I’ve been using Firefox for over a year. What sells me is the extensions: the button that increases font size (I have a high-res monitor), extensions like Scrapbook, which is unbelievably useful. There’s an extension to make it simulate IE for those dumb sites that won’t work otherwise. It’s incredibly useful. And I also use Opera when I’m in a hurry and don’t want all Firefox’s features.
I don’t find the memory to be an issue. I’ve used FireFox for about 1 ½ years and have little to complain about. Another browser I use occasionally is Opera. I find it small and faster then either IE or FF. I recommend trying it out.
My wife won’t leave her IE. Some of her favorite sites won’t play properly if they can’t use pop-ups. Then every once in a while I have to clean some virus and spyware off her ‘puter.
Having used Firefox for a while, I’ve now moved on to IE 7, beta 3.
I find it has most of the things I liked in Firefox (tabs for example) but seems to be considerably faster and more compatible with a plethora of web sites..
Tom
I use Maxthon primarily but have Firefox in reserve. Since I do development having all three (IE6, Maxthon and Firefox) is handy. Firefox is, on average, fractionally faster than IE6 and I like Firefox’s search substantially better than IE6 or Maxthon. But Maxthon is unquestionably superior in its tabbing, RSS feeds and shutdown/restore functionality to Firefox, IE6 or even IE7. I might consider going back to Firefox if there were a way to sync the bookmarks with favorites in real time (or just use favorites instead of the bookmarks xml file).
Milo.
I really, really hate that you can’t do right click attachments download with firefox, I have to click on the damn thing in order to open it and some files I just want to download, the same problems I have encounter with the yahoogroups file section. I love FF for the tabbed browsing and the lack of spyware.
Sorry Angel can’t help you there.
There are many questions on how the market share can be measured. Taking in account the market share of OSes that do not run IE at all immediately cuts the possible market share of IE to 80’ish percentile. Now, account for all other browsers in Windows systems and this must go down significantly. Finally, different users use the web diferently… I’d guestimate educated users are more prone to use Mozilla and are more on the web. Hence even with the number of machines 60 IE/40 the rest, overall presence on the web would not be dominated by IE…
My own website shows statistics comparable to this conclusion. From 2003 ’till now percentile of Mozilla users as visitors “crept up” from about 57% to over 70% now. (One needs to account for the particular site public inclanation here as well, but I find this number more informative than the “official studies”).
Personally, I mainly use the OS where IE is not available at all and when using Windows I find IE very cludgy and lacking features (examples: preferences are actually part of the Win OS networking settings ; lack of tabbed browsing [can anyone go without it nowdays?],…). Mainly using Mozilla (finding Firefox preferences too “dumbed-down”. be it from the same family). I use modern machines with over 1GB memory, hence I don’t see any “memory hogging” issues (I have yet to find my Linux or Windows using all the memory available).
Firefox broke ground – since Microsoft’s domination, the original players have all remained intact, and slowly been taken over by the ‘already installed’ generation of computer users who don’t need, or haven’t even considered an alternative or a different featureset based on their needs.
People are quite, well, sheepish, and tend to follow the majority. Dell is a great example, the original Starbucks clientele, voters within demographically similar geographical locales and the like. We all know that ‘word of mouth’ is the most powerful advertising vehicle in existence – and that’s how Firefox won and won big.
Sure, they aren’t the market leader, not even if you were to lump all of the Mozilla based browsers into one bucket. But my biggest question is – Why wasn’t Mozilla the predominant brand and Firefox some offshoot like the other myriad of arcane browsers (well, arcane and unknown to me)? If a ‘franchisee’ does better than the ‘franchise’ – there’s a problem, and it needs to be seriously reviewed.
I think Firefox rocks, but in the last two weeks, it does seem, weird (the current beta). I have to admit falling in love with IE7, but until all the plugins are available, Firefox has my heart.
And speaking of the ‘i just accept it’ mentality, let’s talk about AOL users and AOL’s software. Sure, it’s free now, but there are so many applications installed when you install anything, say even WinAmp, you end up with 10 files/shortcuts on your desktop, 2 new system tray icons and 6 new services and 4 startup applications. AOL has never, ever asked if you wanted shortucuts, start menu, etc. – they have always just done what they want.
C’mon people. It’s time we demand proper disclosure from everyone, including AOL. Why? Because they are one of the few, that isn’t spy/adware, that has this practice, in fact, many of the ‘sneaky installs’ of 10 applications when you download 1 free one are better than that of AOL, at least asking you where you want and dont want icons, where to install it, what else it may do – but AOL has been above the law.
I have been a longtime love of AOL, but they waited to long – busy drinking their merger KoolAid. They never got shopping until three years ago. They still don’t get demographic targeting – and they have had more data on people (as we are now well aware) than most and missed the biggest opportunities anyone had.
Bottomless photo storage – great feature, but everyone else pretty much does it too. Their creative kicks butt – but their stand-alone application (which I would anticipate to go away very soon) still needs to be fixed in many ways – they’ve never maintained a consistent UI and didn’t offer users the ability to customize the application to use Outlook instead of AOL mail, or use an external brower window instead of the internal brower. There are so many things they should and could have done.
AOL, you are doing an incredible job — but as this article rings clear – people want and will seek out choice when it’s made available to them, for free and better than the ‘old guy.’ While your overstaffed company was busy having their lofty stock discussions – the rest of the world moved ahead – and you were sitting with an incredible userbase.
But, as former Internet Explorer users (including me) said – “Bye Bye!”
And isn’t it crazy how ‘once you leave, you rarely go back?’
Can’t wait to celebrate 1/2 a billion downloads!
Lonny Paul
http://www.lonnypaul.com