Firefox Download Day

by Tim Shier

In yesterday's newsletter we featured Firefox’s campaign to break the world record for “most downloads in a 24hour period”.

The current target is 1.6 million, which was the total for Firefox 2. Considering the overall population of Firefox users, this is actually rather low. On their site they are looking at the tiny target of 5 million downloads, but judging from the community interaction I suspect it will be MUCH MUCH MUCH higher.

Currently Firefox accounts for about 23% of all browsers while IE has just over 60% (more stats). This is changing however - over the past 8 months Firefox has seen an increase of about 3%, while IE has seen an equal decrease. Hmm… Is that user theft? I hope so :p

Some of the stats:

• Over 1 million people have pledged to download the application.
• The page has been Dug 2892 times with 92 very loving comments.
• Firefox has about 130 million users (updated according to new stats).

Ok sure, so I’m putting a case together that this may actually work. BUT what’s realistically in it for us – the global community? Quite a lot actually, with more than 1500 updates since Firefox 2; including updates to make it more secure, easier to use, more personal (read: customisable), and offering an improved platform for developers. The overall improved performance means it now makes the most of your bandwidth limitations and provides a completely customisable experience.

What is more significant is that Firefox 3 is strictly W3C compliant (the web standards rule makers). This is in direct opposition to Internet Explorer. Microsoft have taken it upon themselves to bend - and in many cases break - the rules; leaving designers with a continual battle to make sites work in Internet Explorer.

So, why the push from us?

Well, besides wanting to be nice to our designers, we believe there is a real community level objective here. If we can drastically increase the market share of Firefox then Internet Explorer will have less room to call the shots. Which also means they'll have to shape up their web standards and play by the rules; which would be for the communal good.

Designers typically spend 8-15% of their time forcing the website to render on Internet Explorer. So, if all browsers rendered according to the same standards then we would have the opportunity to have the entire WWW becoming 8-15% better, literally overnight - nice!

The release date is the 17th of June 2008 (in 5 days). In the interim, add their banners to your site (or even host a Firefox party) and let’s collectively spread the word. For more details about Firefox 3 Download Day, have a look here.

2008/06/12 | permalink | comments (0) | trackbacks (0)

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