17/09/04
18Go Firefox, Go!
As already reported by Asa, after only 2 days the estimated download of Firefox 1.0 preview release is at half a million! The aim is to get 1 million downloads in 10 days, so things are looking good! Whether this will now tail off – who can say? Keep an eye on SpreadFirefox.com which has a live totaliser to keep you updated.
Also, a peek at the latest Browser Statistics from W3C schools is showing Mozilla more than doubling its share since January! OK, a site like that is more likely to attract the kind of people who would use Firefox, but it still shows growth in one audience. 17.7%! Incredible!
I firmly believe that our only hope of making life better for us as designers, is to promote Firefox. I would like to promote Safari and Omniweb, but I have to face it, Mac only browsers aren’t going to be denting anyone’s market share.
We may never get more than 30%, but that would be enough to make clients take notice, and care how their sites look in a decent browser, as well as the ubiquitous IE. There will always be the people who don’t even know that there is a thing called a ‘browser’, let alone that there are alternatives, but that’s OK. Headway is being made at rate that I wouldn’t have thought possible a few months ago.
Update 18.9.04: They did it – in only 4 days! The goal is now 2 million!
Further reading: The Fight Has Just Begun
Tags: firefox
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John said 1452 days ago:
A couple of people I have turned on to Firefox have reported problems with their online banking (IE only can you believe!) do you know of any further info regarding this apparent problem?Sam said 1452 days ago:
It’s fantastic news isn’t it Jon! The biggest push is standards itself, and once designers and coders employ more standards based designs into their work, if they promote browsers like Firefox to their clients then the end users are going to be more knowledgeable.John, the only thing you can do about this is complain to the online banking companies themselves, they are the thoughtless ones designing for IE or Netscape 4.0 browsers only, it’s like living in the stone age.
Paul D said 1452 days ago:
I’ve heard of banking sites that are IE-only, but I’ve never seen one. Usually they still work if you fake the IE user-agent string. Obviously, if a bank purposely tries to break its website for non-IE/Windows users, the only thing you can do is to change banks.However, since the emergence of malicious IE plug-ins that can record and transmit your banking passwords, many banks (Citibank comes to mind) have gone so far as to tell their customers not to use Internet Explorer.
I’ve also heard that if a bank website doesn’t work with Safari, you can tell Apple and Apple will personally ask the bank to fix it. Not sure if it’s true, but it sounds like something Apple would do.
Part of the problem, I think, is that a lot of so-called web developers learned their trade 6 years ago, and they’re still designing with an IE 5 / Netscape 4 paradigm in mind (and since NN4 sucked, you had to block it from a lot of sites). I work with some web application developers who are only vaguely aware that non-IE browsers even exist. I’m continually showing them how poor their IE-centric code looks in other browsers
Scott said 1452 days ago:
I have been downloading the nightlies and I like them better than the 1.0 PR =(.I wonder how they control that image, I really like it.
i&ta said 1452 days ago:
Installed 1.0 Preview Release last night because 0.9.1 had been misbehaving like never before: Slow City. Unfortunately, FF 1.0PR lost some usability unless I am missing something. No longer does the Find function access words in input boxes such as this. Here there is the preview so it doesn’t matter but at a phpbb where I can write long posts, I often use Find to get to another part of my post-in-progress. How many other usability issues exist? Looking at mozillazine, the board is afire with bugs.Re: The Fight… > Google
One reason Google users are IE-users is that Google’s toolbar is IE-only. I’d drop IE6 from my desktop but I’d lose the usability I so cherish: the highlight and keyword buttons and the “search this site only” feature. Firefox doesn’t have plugins for that (but maybe there is a switch or something I don’t know about when entering keywords into Firefox’s Google toolbar plugin, anyone?). And I’ve just noticed three search engines, Yahoo!, Amazon, and eBay, were added without my knowledge/permission, thus, enhancing my chances for carpal tunnel (kidding) by placing them above the only two engines I want, Google and Dictionary.com. But, hey, thanks for installing them without asking me and making me feel like a mindless consumer (not kidding).
I don’t like the direction Firefox is taking if they are going to go and ruin a good thing. Still, it is the best browser to use for most of my needs. So, c’mon, Firefox, get it right with 1.0 Final Release!
David Schontzler said 1452 days ago:
There are some issues with type ahead find in PR1.0 that they are working on.Also, if you can’t live without it, there is a Google bar extension out there for Firefox already!
David Schontzler said 1452 days ago:
Whoops, HTML gets stripped…Googlebar extension link
i&ta said 1452 days ago:
Thanks, David! When I installed Firefox in June I was all over the support sites installing plugins and whatnot. Those features were most definitely not part of the Google toolbar I had installed. I’ve got a screenshot around somewhere receiving the “8×10 glossies with circles and arrows” rant treatment. Heck, I’ve ranted about this several times and nobody ever corrected me. So, thanks again.But I wonder what the heck happened in June since at the link you provided it is stated that the toolbar I just installed is a version from March… Oh, well, I am most grateful. No more opening IE!!! Well, except to test my site. And, of course, thanks again. Really!!!
Signed,
Google-gusher
Stereo said 1452 days ago:
This is it Jon, this is what we’ve been waiting for! Hurrah for Firefox! Take off every Zig!Kyle Jones said 1451 days ago:
John,How does it feel having your logo on Firefox now that its becoming the talk of major news sites and you see it everywhere you look!
Gerrit van Aaken said 1451 days ago:
One million downloads in four days. And, man, it is a preview release! What if they release the final version? And all the localised version of 1.0 (german, french, spanish, klingon …) It’s getting kind of a revolution.Jon Hicks said 1450 days ago:
” How does it feel having your logo on Firefox now that its becoming the talk of major news sites and you see it everywhere you look!”I gotta admit, its gives me a buzz!
Aidan Dunbar said 1450 days ago:
the problem is, that with all these people downloading the PR version, will thye bother downloading the Stable Release… a lot of these people will get fed up with downloading firefox over and over and may give up… thus going back to IE or whatever… :SJon Hicks said 1450 days ago:
True, although I think the preview release is very stable. Its all the extensions that really make Firefox worthwhile that don’t work! They’ve just changed the way that extensions work in FF, and all the extension developers are having to update them.Brian Behrend said 1449 days ago:
I constantly used “find as you type” in the older version of Firefox, but for some reason the feature is disable by default in 1.0PR.You can go to Tools > Options > Advanced and re-enable it.
My only issue has been that the new version has broken a lot of my extensions, but I’m sure that’ll be fixed soon.
Joseph Huang said 1445 days ago:
“They’ve just changed the way that extensions work in FF, and all the extension developers are having to update them.”Really? I thought the only magor change from .9.X was incrementing extensions.version to .10
You can try changing it back to .9 if you’re having difficulty installing certain extensions.
Kris Khaira said 1443 days ago:
My ISP webmail site, and account maintenance site is IE-only. Can you believe? Not a banking site but an ISP! And this is the country’s largest ISP, that also owns nearly 90% of broadband lines.Malaysia.
Jon Hicks said 1443 days ago:
Kris- that really sucks!