John's Blog - Latest Comments in Mozilla & Firefox Market Share

Re: Mozilla & Firefox Market Share

unknown — Fri, 19 Dec 2008 10:01:41 -0000

I removed firefox this morning for downloading files without my express permission.
I really like how they removed the option to disable automatic updates

Re: Mozilla & Firefox Market Share

johnolilly — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 21:46:58 -0000

Ah -- I said that we're effective at it everywhere but [South] Korea (and presumably North, too, but that's not really what i meant.)

In South Korea, there are some government regulations & crypto techs that are used by the government that require ActiveX implementations, and so it's been very very hard for us to get any significant traction -- as a result , it's harder for us to spread the OpenWeb message.

Re: Mozilla & Firefox Market Share

Nelson B — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 17:03:54 -0000

Why does market share effectively help the spread of Web standards everywhere but Korea?
Why not Korea? (Presumably you mean South Korea). Is it:
- because FF has NO market share there?
- because FF owns the market there?
- something else?

Re: Mozilla & Firefox Market Share

Bruce A. Wittmeier — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 13:33:50 -0000

My hat goes off to the Mozilla team. It wasnt enough that MS couldnt compete on a level playing field and began giving away the browser, but then to attempt to integrate it into the O/S was beyond belief.

The stamina and professionalism of the Mozilla team deserves an award for perseverance and development of a superior product.

Bruce

Re: Mozilla & Firefox Market Share

Romi — Wed, 14 May 2008 03:52:59 -0000

OMG, there's already 5 trackback from Indonesian blog here, most of them mention that Firefox users is half the
Indonesian population.

"Why are so many people in China using the English version of Firefox?"
In Indonesian, all users are using en-US version, mainly because it's just right on your face when you go to the download page. None are complaining, since we're already using with English Windows, and (most?) of them is pirated version.

Internet bandwidth is still expensive for the most of us, not counting limited International bandwidth, but I guess most of the 'techies' and bloggers are using Firefox. Recently, I asked the stats from a big forum and Firefox is already surpassed 50%. There is stats from a 6 month old Indonesian blogging service that speaks the same.

Re: Mozilla & Firefox Market Share

Kamahl — Sat, 02 Feb 2008 04:40:03 -0000

Simple. My firewall (McAffe) will block any unknown program from accessing the net without my permission. I had to turn on the warnings, otherwise they are silent.
It mesures a 'safe app' by checking the md5sum against it's allowed database. (big!)
It takes a day for someone to accept the new checksum, and add it to the database, and another day for all users to have downloaded the new database. that accounts for two or three days of blocked firefox after every update!

Re: Mozilla & Firefox Market Share

Brian Masinick — Fri, 04 Jan 2008 19:25:21 -0000

Perhaps I overlooked it in the article and the comments, but are there also any rough statistics, among the Firefox downloads and/or the usage patterns of how many Firefox users are on the various platforms that are supported: UNIX, Linux, BSD, Windows... ?

Re: Mozilla & Firefox Market Share

Jay@Bangkok — Fri, 14 Dec 2007 15:05:37 -0000

Dear webmaster,

I am in Bangkok and study in IT so I was assigned to find the open source. Then I thought that Firefox is interested for presentation. And I think I would like to present the statistic of download of Firefox. However, I don't have data for compare with other browser , so would you please get the statistic of download of Firefox to me?.

Best Regard
Jay

Re: Mozilla & Firefox Market Share

Simon — Tue, 04 Dec 2007 10:07:45 -0000

Firefox comes with a default live bookmark that points to the BBC News RSS feed.

Have you asked bbc.co.uk what are the usage stats they receive?

Re: Mozilla & Firefox Market Share

Michael Vincent van Rantwijk — Mon, 03 Dec 2007 18:21:16 -0000

I wonder why MoCo isn't comparing the IP numbers used for downloads (for installations) with the IP numbers used for updates???

Re: Mozilla & Firefox Market Share

Nick H — Mon, 03 Dec 2007 05:40:54 -0000

I think a lot of people are getting distracted with the nitty gritty details of converting the pings into absolute number of users. Yes, MoCo has no magical way of doing an absolute conversion from software update pings, to ADU, to users.

I do appreciate John providing so many details into how the .125 billion figure was calculated; however, the real news is that the software update pings have doubled relatively quickly. I think it's safe to assume that this is roughly proportional to ADU over the span of this measurement.

Double is double, regardless of the exact number you're doubling.

Re: Mozilla & Firefox Market Share

Rafael — Fri, 30 Nov 2007 15:54:46 -0000

Now if you apply either $1, $4, or $40+ per user per year, that $80MM a year is kinda chump change.

Nice problem to have though.

Ask Adobe or Emmy for total number of Web users. They're within 5-10% of having every user on the web world-wide. They had been public about the numbers in the past.

Re: Mozilla & Firefox Market Share

VanillaMozilla — Wed, 28 Nov 2007 17:33:21 -0000

If we lose 10% of users temporarily with each update, it wouldn't be at all surprising if we lost 1% permanently with each update. That's a lot, but you would probably never notice from ping statistics.

We see a lot of users on the support forum who claim that they have configured/turned off/uninstalled their firewall, so it couldn't be a firewall problem. With sufficient persuasion most of these users eventually fix their firewall and eat their words, but that level of support is impossible for the vast majority of users. It might be a good idea to devote some resources to this problem.

Re: Mozilla & Firefox Market Share

oscar — Wed, 28 Nov 2007 14:01:27 -0000

Same with Debian, automatic updates of Iceweasel are disabled and handled via package managers. And as Firefox is the standard browser in all but a few Linux distros, you're probably missing a few million of us.

It might be a good method to count windows and mac users based on how many times a given update, say e.g. 2.0.0.8 has been downloaded. How do these compare to the update ping numbers?

Re: Mozilla & Firefox Market Share

Benjamin — Wed, 28 Nov 2007 13:45:47 -0000

John,
The difficulty in measuring market share of open source applications is one the OpenOffice.org, each Linux distro, and many other communities have grappled with. If you were to generalize Mozilla's experience to create a strategy paper for other projects to follow, what would it look like? Is there a chance Mozilla would be interesting in participating with some other projects to develop their own capabilities similar to yours?

-Ben

Re: Mozilla & Firefox Market Share

Ed — Wed, 28 Nov 2007 13:43:13 -0000

I know some users who freak out whenever any security update comes, and stay off the Internet entirely until "the shakes start" - frequently around a week or so. On at least one of my computers, I only do updates if either I'm at a convenient point to close all of my windows * tabs, or I need to go to an untrusted site. On another computer, I only run updates that fix problems that would affect me (javascript bug? That computer doesn't have javascript enabled, so no biggie.)

I'd suspect that the firewall thing you mention is actually specific to proxying firewalls, which could cache the presence of an update, and therefore each actual ping you get could be one user or 10,000 users. However, most home firewalls, being simple packet filters, would have no impact.

Re: Mozilla & Firefox Market Share

Gostak — Wed, 28 Nov 2007 13:36:52 -0000

The ping hit is a minimum number. I don't want my software to talk to the world without my knowledge. Updates get queried and installed at ***MY*** request, and then only after I let the query through my firewall!

Further, how do you count where Firefox is installed on both a Windows and a Linux partition? Is that one or two installs?

Personally I would count it as two.

Re: Mozilla & Firefox Market Share

Franadora — Wed, 28 Nov 2007 12:59:42 -0000

Another factor - I (one person) use Firefox at work (part time - internal corporate applications require IE6) as well as on two machines at home. And have at least two users on each of my home machines (one Administrator, one Limited). So - is there a separate AUS ping for each user on the same machine? Then I would probably account for up to 5 or maybe even 6 pings on some days (usually Mondays or Tuesdays when I traditionally check Windows updates.)

But even if there is not, you would get 3 user pings for one real user.

Re: Mozilla & Firefox Market Share

Tuxi — Wed, 28 Nov 2007 11:05:15 -0000

Are you saying that behind corporate firewalls you may have several users that get counted as one? If so, my several Linux machines and three Windows machines at home are likely counted as one because of the router. For my home anyway, the multiplier is much greater than 3.

Re: Mozilla & Firefox Market Share

Alan Lord — Wed, 28 Nov 2007 10:53:29 -0000

Another couple here. FF on Ubuntu and FF built from source for my "Linux From Scratch" server based boxes. (I turn off automatic updates in the .mozconfig file). So there's two more here...

Re: Mozilla & Firefox Market Share

John — Wed, 28 Nov 2007 10:49:48 -0000

hey carl, seth, alan, harley -- you're all exactly right -- i should have listed linux distros as a significant factor in the "firefox dark matter" in the world -- it exists, but we don't have ways to see it. linux use certainly accounts for at least single-digit millions every day (and maybe more), but it's hard to say exactly how many. easier to approximate this number than it is folks using it behind enterprise firewalls, though.

Re: Mozilla & Firefox Market Share

Carl Parrish — Wed, 28 Nov 2007 10:26:04 -0000

Another Linux user (Fedora), I'm sure your numbers are much higher than what you're seeing. May want to check with the major distros and see if they have stats on FF users.

Re: Mozilla & Firefox Market Share

Seth Galitzer — Wed, 28 Nov 2007 09:58:11 -0000

I'm with Alan Bell. Gentoo manages updates the same way. In fact, the "check for firefox updates" is disable in the application so the distro can manage the updates. I bet your numbers are actually much higher than what you're seeing.

Re: Mozilla & Firefox Market Share

Alan Bell — Wed, 28 Nov 2007 09:21:01 -0000

my 3 Ubuntu computers all have Firefox with updates arriving from the Ubuntu repositories, not direct, so I am using a recent build but you won't see me in your stats.

Re: Mozilla & Firefox Market Share

Harley — Wed, 28 Nov 2007 08:07:02 -0000

Also, remember that for people who get Firefox as part of a Linux distribution, automatic update for Firefox itself is disabled. This is because the Linux distribution itself will manage updates, and there is no need for Firefox to also manage updates.

So, it seems possible that using this methodology, nearly all Linux Firefox users may be uncounted.