Asa has posted a graph and write-up of the Firefox download numbers.
Not bad for a little Open Source project, is it?
Posted by jzawodn at December 30, 2004 12:22 PM
The number of users is bound to be larger as most people I know have downloaded it once and installed it on many PCs. I wonder what the acutal user numbers are. Does any one know?
Not bad for a little open source project at all.
I downloaded it three separate times to three different machines (Windows at work, Linux on my home desktop, and OS X on my PowerBook), so I'm not sure how you would relate these numbers to actual users.
I don't know of many "little" open source projects that put two-page ads in the New York Times.
what is interesting to me is how flat the growth is after the first week (because that’s probably the most reliable aspect of the numbers — the absolute count is likely not entirely accurate).
i would have expected more of an acceleration in the number of downloads as the marketing and press kicked in.
One way to masure "users" is look at browser share. Mozilla and Firefox are up to 21%. See: http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp
I agree that it's difficult to figure out how large is the user base from some (admittadly incomplete) download statistics.
Here's what we know (or think we know). It's been widely reported that Microsoft lost either 4 points (if you believe WebSideStory, which is US focused) or 5 points (if you believe OneStat, which is World/Europe focused) since _May_.
But an even more interesting number is not what Firefox has gained in the last few months (which has definitely been nice, and at a good clip) but what the total Gecko-based browser share (firefox, mozilla 1.x, camino, others) is.
The newest data we have on that is from the end of November and beginning of December. OneStat says 7.35% and WebSideStory says 6.89%. More tech focused sites like CNet and W3Schools reported 18% and 22.4% respectively.
(I know you can't really mix these different studies, but just for fun, if you look at Global Reach, there are just over 800 million intenet users. Doing the math on that with the onestat and websidestory numbers would put Gecko-browser users at 50-60M.)
seems like more hype about another gates-killer embraced by a tech-trendy crowd
I hate graphs like this. There are only two options:
1. The download sites use HTTP caching, in which case they have no way of knowing the number of downloads, and the graph is pretty useless.
2. The download sites disabled HTTP caching, in which case they *still* have no idea as to the usage (cover CDs on magazines, etc), plus they are *wasting money* on bandwidth.
Neither option is very appealing. I can understand the desire to know how many peopel are using it, but I don't see why people insist on spreading misinformation when they don't have real data.
Good Luck firefox and a happy new year 2005!
All the best, Jeremy!
As far as I know, the whole mozilla project is supported by Netscape, so open source is the type of the project, but the support is totally different compared with other open source projects.
