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Over 8,000,000 Mozilla Firefox 3 Downloads in 24 Hours (MozillaZine)

MozillaZine reports on the download rate for the newly released Firefox 3 browser. "The official Mozilla Blog reports that there were over eight million downloads of Mozilla Firefox 3 in the twenty-four hours after release, despite the widespread server availability problems. The Spread Firefox Download Day 2008 page has an interactive map showing the numbers of downloads in different countries and Mozilla Corporation CEO John Lilly has a weblog post with more statistics from Firefox 3's first twenty-four hours."
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Over 8,000,000 Mozilla Firefox 3 Downloads in 24 Hours (MozillaZine)

Posted Jun 19, 2008 9:55 UTC (Thu) by rvfh (subscriber, #31018) [Link]

Guinea-Bissau: 1 download.

More downloads in France than in Canada.

Ah! numbers can make us waste so much time :)

Over 8,000,000 Mozilla Firefox 3 Downloads in 24 Hours (MozillaZine)

Posted Jun 20, 2008 10:14 UTC (Fri) by JoeBuck (subscriber, #2330) [Link]

Since France has a much larger population than Canada, I don't know why you're surprised.

Over 8,000,000 Mozilla Firefox 3 Downloads in 24 Hours (MozillaZine)

Posted Jun 19, 2008 9:56 UTC (Thu) by rvfh (subscriber, #31018) [Link]

And what about the Linux distributions automatic updates?
Didn't need to download to get it on my Kubuntu 8.04...

Over 8,000,000 Mozilla Firefox 3 Downloads in 24 Hours (MozillaZine)

Posted Jun 19, 2008 10:25 UTC (Thu) by iabervon (subscriber, #722) [Link]

They were going for a record number of downloads from their own site, so those don't count
towards their statistic of interest. Although it might be amusing in the future for distros to
set up a mechanism where their package manager would first try to get particular packages from
the (very) partial distro mirrors on upstreams' sites.

Posted Jun 19, 2008 10:07 UTC (Thu) by asamardzic (subscriber, #27161) [Link]

I know it may not be the most appropriate place to ask a question, but nevertheless: I was not
tracking Firefox 3 development much, but as it become available, I upgraded this morning
through my distribution upgrade mechanism (it's Slackware, so it should not differ much from
the "official" one), and found that it is freezing sometimes on larger images loads: it start
loading the image, and it displays some part of it, and then it freezes completely (not
possible to change to the other tab, or to press any of toolbar buttons, or anything else),
and then after couple seconds (or couple of tens of seconds sometimes), GUI becomes responsive
again.  Very annoying; any suggestion?

Posted Jun 19, 2008 10:53 UTC (Thu) by MattPerry (subscriber, #46341) [Link]

The mozillazine forums would probably be a better place to ask.  But, having said that, did
the old one work fine?  If so, then just downgrade.

Posted Jun 19, 2008 17:40 UTC (Thu) by Tet (subscriber, #5433) [Link]

Downgrade? Hah! The mozilla developers don't believe in such things. Once you've tried it
once, you're screwed. For example, it changes your cookie file from plain text to an sqlite
db. Bummer if (like me) your home directory is NFS mounted across machines with a mix of FF1,
2 and 3. The first time you try FF3, you can't then go back to older versions without loss of
data :-( Unix is sadly very much a second class citizen in the mozilla world, which seems very
much focused on single user machines like Windows.

WTF?

Posted Jun 20, 2008 2:55 UTC (Fri) by Los__D (subscriber, #15263) [Link]

How in the world does an upgrade changing file format have _ANYTHING_ to do with Unix being a
second class citizen?

Do you also run around screaming "2nd class citizen!!!", when X updates it's configuration
files? When Evolution do? When Postfix do? When g++ changes ABI?

Posted Jun 22, 2008 16:34 UTC (Sun) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

cp -a .mozilla .mozilla-old

[test]
[bugger]

rm -rf .mozilla
mv .mozilla-old .mozilla

Posted Jun 19, 2008 10:58 UTC (Thu) by tjc (guest, #137) [Link]

See http://lwn.net/Articles/284295/

Freezes

Posted Jun 19, 2008 10:59 UTC (Thu) by rsidd (subscriber, #2582) [Link]

It sounds like the fsync bug on ext3, that was "fixed" in rc2.  (For me, things aren't quite
as smooth as in FF2 but it's a big improvement on previous versions of FF3.)  But it shouldn't
manifest itself on images as far as I know.  It is most obvious when typing in the address bar
and on some other operations involving sqlite.

The only image-related thing I can think of is colour management support, which apparently
causes a performance hit, but for that reason it is disabled by default and can only be
enabled via about:config.  Perhaps slackware enables it by default.  

Google for links.

Freezes

Posted Jun 21, 2008 16:37 UTC (Sat) by vonbrand (subscriber, #4458) [Link]

In Fedora rawhide FF freezes due to a problem with spell checking. Turned that off, had no problems since.

fsync, maybe

Posted Jun 19, 2008 11:11 UTC (Thu) by elanthis (subscriber, #6227) [Link]

Are you getting heavy disk access during this freeze?  If so, it might be the fsync bug.
Although honestly, you shouldn't have this if you just installed 3.0 final.

If you're not getting fsync access, then it could very well be something else in the new
Firefox3 stack, such as cairo image rendering.  If you're sure it only freezes on images, this
sounds rather likely: your video driver might need an update to handle Firefox's heavy
cairo/RENDER usage properly.

As said by another commentor, the correct place for you to ask this is MozillaZine or
Mozilla's Bugzilla.

fsync, maybe

Posted Jun 19, 2008 11:39 UTC (Thu) by asamardzic (subscriber, #27161) [Link]

There is not much of the disk access throughout the freeze, but on the other side I noticed
the problem re-appears if I work for some time with other tabs, and then get back to the tab
where the image is loaded, so indeed it's probably something with the image rendering (BTW,
the color management is off)...  In any case: thanks for all suggestions, and the pointer to
the proper place to ask for support - am trying my luck there, apologies once again for asking
the question here.

Do you have RandR and DRI enabled?

Posted Jun 19, 2008 13:03 UTC (Thu) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link]

Recently found that if you enable OpenGL support in some versions of binary ATI drivers it disables DRI and RandR and Firefox 3 becomes SUPERslow. Firefox 2 is not affected.

Do you have RandR and DRI enabled?

Posted Jun 19, 2008 13:19 UTC (Thu) by rvfh (subscriber, #31018) [Link]

This is indeed a problem that exists with nVidia cards too.
See this:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/firefox-3.0/+bu...

Do you have RandR and DRI enabled?

Posted Jun 19, 2008 15:58 UTC (Thu) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

Why would Firefox care about DRI? It's not doing 3D stuff, is it?

Do you have RandR and DRI enabled?

Posted Jun 20, 2008 3:47 UTC (Fri) by jamesh (subscriber, #1159) [Link]

I'd guess that the problem is poor performance from the Render extension.  It is possible that
disabling DRI also disables the acceleration of that extension, leading to the poor
performance.

Do you have RandR and DRI enabled?

Posted Jun 22, 2008 16:31 UTC (Sun) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

I think only EXA accelerates Render to any extent, so if EXA is being 
disabled (falling back to XAA) you *might* see a slowdown. (However, on my 
distinctly aged Athlon desktop with a distinctly aged Radeon video card, I 
see no performance problems with the render extension at all. However this 
might be because, my failing memory tells me, the Radeon 9250 et al are 
one of the few cards to have XAA-accelerated Render...)

Over 8,000,000 Mozilla Firefox 3 Downloads in 24 Hours (MozillaZine)

Posted Jun 19, 2008 11:07 UTC (Thu) by haxpor (guest, #52615) [Link]

I downloaded it and upgrade to my very old firefox on fedora core 6.
Yeah that's good and flexible, thanks.

Any post-mortem story?

Posted Jun 19, 2008 14:00 UTC (Thu) by ikm (subscriber, #493) [Link]

I wonder why did they let themselves to be DDOSed so easily -- apparently they knew the risks
involved, yet still the moment the download day started their websites went down. There were
some strange glitches as well -- e.g., it was actually offering firefox 2.0.0.14 download
instead of 3.0 for some time, and so on. I wonder if there is an insider story about all that
somewhere on the net. Post-mortem stories are always an interesting read.

Downloads by which browsers?

Posted Jun 20, 2008 8:04 UTC (Fri) by utoddl (subscriber, #1232) [Link]

I wonder if it would be interesting to know the distribution of user agents that handled the downloads.

Politically Interesting numbers

Posted Jun 20, 2008 10:59 UTC (Fri) by ccyoung (subscriber, #16340) [Link]

Here's a couple that jumps off the page:
- Iran 483K
- Iraq 637
In terms of population, looks like Iran has the highest percentage of downloads - interesting,
how much of this is distrust of US conflated(?) with distrust of Microsoft?  And for Iraq, how
many of these were US soldiers and contractors, or do they have their IP routed through US?
(or is Firefox too radical for the DOD, like blogs?)  In any case it forces you to wonder how
many of Iraq's intellectual class have fled the country and how devastated is its
infrastructure, both horribly sad.

Venezuela was a surprise - would have thought socialist Chavez would have put computers in the
hands of more people.  Apparently, unlike de Silva of Brazil, he's not much of a technocrat.

Most disappointing for me were Russia, China and India.  What percent of those computers are
pirated Microsoft?  What percentage of the techs are hired in monolithic Microsoft shops?

South Korea was disappointing as well.  With their bandwidth and general technological wealth
they're showing an astonishing lack of independence.

Then we have Spain and Italy, one heading left and one heading right, but both heavy users.
One wonders if the US government will be using more Firefox if Obama is elected.

Politically ignorant numbers

Posted Jun 20, 2008 12:03 UTC (Fri) by JoeBuck (subscriber, #2330) [Link]

Brazil has 7.2 times as many people as Venezuela, and had 7.9 times as many downloads. That's a pretty weak thread to hang your political thesis on.

agreed

Posted Jun 20, 2008 12:41 UTC (Fri) by ccyoung (subscriber, #16340) [Link]

(that took me complete off guard - thanks)

Politically Interesting numbers

Posted Jun 20, 2008 14:45 UTC (Fri) by szh (guest, #23558) [Link]

> Most disappointing for me were Russia,

good approximation for Russia is global statistics from this russian tracker (warning: non
ascii symbols)
http://gs.spylog.ru/r/?visitors=on&browser_name=__all...

Internet Explorer  61.4467%
Opera   18.9840%
FireFox 17.7853%
Mozilla   0.7595%
Safari    0.6719%
n/a       0.2216%
Netscape Navigator 0.0855%
Konqueror 0.0286% 


Politically Interesting numbers

Posted Jun 26, 2008 7:44 UTC (Thu) by BenHutchings (subscriber, #37955) [Link]

In South Korea, for historical reasons, retail web sites tend to use an ActiveX control
instead of SSL for encrypting purchase details. So Internet Explorer is pretty well locked-in
there.

Download per capita estimates for each country

Posted Jul 7, 2008 3:00 UTC (Mon) by amosbatto (guest, #52567) [Link]

I updated the estimates of downloads per population for Firefox 3.0 for 2008-07-07:01am. The
Lithuanians still have far more downloads per capita than anyone else in the world, but the
percentage of the population is12.8%, which is only a rise of 1.5% since the June 17 launch
day.  Most other countries have doubled or tripled their percentages since launch day. 

See: http://66.150.224.204/amos/percentDownloadingFF3.html

See estimates after launch day: http://dd.dzubak.sk/dd_down-pop

Maybe the traffic to Lithuania was really going to Russia as some have suggested, but then the
numbers should have continued to rise after the launch date. The fact that there was a sudden
surge only on launch day, suggests a deliberate attempt to game the system.

Nonetheless, the data is very interesting, and a little depressing since I am currently in
Bolivia where only 1 in 1000 have downloaded Firefox 3.0.
Cheers, Amos Batto

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