Just shy of Firefox’s first birthday party, the Mozilla Foundation celebrated the 100 millionth download of its Web browser Wednesday. “This is a great milestone. Our massive, worldwide community of grassroots marketers and users – not to mention the developers – have helped to put out a product that’s really kicking butt,” said Asa Dotzler, the Mozilla liaison to the SpreadFirefox community.
So Firefox is now the McDonalds of browsers?
Firefox’s market share drop since early summer. IE’s share grew, but I think some of those were due to other browsers changing their agent string to look like IE, but not firefox…
Somehow I think this number doesn’t give a wholly accurate depiction of what’s going on. I’ve probably downloaded 7-8 versions of Firefox in the last 6 months, just through upgrading because of security issues. It’s pretty annoying actually, they don’t seem to understand incremental upgrades. You just redownload and reinstall the new browser version. Sure this is a cool milestone. It still shows that more and more people are using Firefox. I would just take the 100 million figure with a grain of salt in terms of the actual number of people using it.
“I’ve probably downloaded 7-8 versions of Firefox in the last 6 months, just through upgrading because of security issues.”
Mozilla folk claim that if you’ve used Firefox to download Firefox, that hasn’t been counted towards the 100 million number.
“I would just take the 100 million figure with a grain of salt in terms of the actual number of people using it.”
And they happen to say this as well.
It is interesting how do they track it? Sounds very suspicios …
Anyway, a lot of people download a lot of applications just to install play and remove and forget. I think that is the case, of course without counting countless reinstalls to the security issues despite the suspicious claims of these guys…
…the greatly exaggerated the download count?
I use SuSE and have yet to down load a copy of Firefox from mozilla. Like most Linux distros I got it with my install of 9.3 and have done all the updates through SuSE’s on line update.
So while I have been responsible for several computers using Firefox – I have yet to be counted even once.
Also I usually install an extention called “User Agent Switcher” and at least some of these are set to default to telling the world that they are IE on XP.
So in reality we really have no way to tell just howmany of which browsers are out there.
But notice that they said the 100 millionth DOWNLOAD, not users. All that they are saying is that it’s a high trafic site and many people are using Firefox. And they are braggin about it
Most probably to Microsoft….
It’s good to see people are downloading Firefox, now Mozilla people need to gauge the exact number of people that OWN the browser, not downloaded it. Suposidly it’s 7.6% of all browsers (wiki: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firefox)
–ZaNkY
Is this counted?
Well we know that there are about 600 million Personal Computers in this world. 100 million people using Firefox
would mean roughly 17.67% of the people would be using Firefox but that is NOT so. These figures likely include all downloads of Firefox and doesnt represent the number of people using Firefox.
Sorry correction it would mean 16.67 % of people using Firefox.
Your calculations could be correct if all people would use legal software (I suppose you based on legal Windows copies sold + non-Windows based comps), but countries as China, Russia and its satelites mainly use pirated copies, additionally, mainly outside US, one license copy is used on several computers, especially if they are self-constructed, so sorry but this calculation is flawed. Though I think this flaw does not favour Firefox a lot, anyway ..
The number is pointless. I can’t tell you how many times that I myself have downloaded Firefox on this machine or that, and I doubt that I am the only one who’s downloaded it more than once.
I dont know why people are throwing water over firefox’s resounding success, even if it was 50Million thats great success. Just face it, people love firefox because it’s a damn good browser. Firefox needs to do something against the Microsoft FUD and you also forget that alot of small computer shops install firefox/Mozilla by default and have dont for a while now. These shops dont even come into the figures, just like Linux real desktop usage dont come into actual market share.
Ok people try not to get your panties in a twist ok?
By simply checking what client (browser) was used to download Firefox, they can add +1 to the download counter when Firefox wasn’t used to download Firefox
This means that chances are you won’t be counted more than once per machine, it is fair, you’d say you have X number of machines, so whats wrong with saying you’ve got X number of Firefox installs?
Whats with people voting down perfectly reasonable comments like the one by prismX? He made a point, a good one too.
Another thing worth considering, as Firefox has better Ad Blocking features than IE, IE will always rank higher even when the browsers share the same sized userbase. Why? Because when IE views a page with Ads, it makes several more requests than other browsers. This is why I feel that any website with Ads that shares their usage details is doing everyone a disfavour, producing figures completely off either end of the scale.