January 09, 2005
the new year's firefox download spike
This chart shows the last two weeks of downloads. Each blue bar represents one day of Firefox 1.0 downloads. The first week is fairly representative of what we've seen for Firefox downloads over the last month or so. The second week, which shows a spike of about 20-25%, covers January second through yesterday.
Several possible explanations have been posted to the blog comments from my earlier post. I suspect that it's some of all of those (with the possible exception of attributing hundreds of thousands of extra downloads to Will Chatham's wearing his Firefox t-shirt ;-) We certainly did see some good press in early January, and it certainly seems reasonable that people got some good advice from family members around the holiday visits and now they're returning to work and school to follow up on that advice.
Posted by asa at January 9, 2005 10:35 AMI saw firefox mentioned in both the Daily Record which is a Scottish tabloid and Computer Active which is a UK computing magazine. Took them long enough to pick up on the release.
Posted by: Scott MacVicar on January 9, 2005 12:01 PMIn a recent Slashdot discussion someone mentioned a dramatic decrease in spam around Christmas. Someone replied suggesting that it was because thousands of people got new PCs for Christmas and unplugged their old PCs, thus removing a huge chunk of the spam zombie network. Give them a few weeks to get 0wned again and things should return to normal. For some reason this reply was modded "funny" instead of "insightful."
Anyway, my thought is that this guy may be right. Lots of new PCs after Christmas means people are repeating things they've done before -- from getting 0wned to installing their favorite software. If that's the case, this recent increase in the download rate won't affect overall market share much, unfortunately. In fact, Firefox could slip a little from the people who got new PCs but *didn't* reinstall Firefox -- e.g., all the non-tech-savy people who had it installed for them the first time around, and won't bother to do it themselves.
Posted by: Kevin on January 9, 2005 12:04 PMI hate to be a downer, but it could also be because most people were busy with things like boxing week shopping, gift returns, and News Years preparations. What would the chart look like, if you included two or three weeks prior.
Posted by: ChrisI on January 9, 2005 12:43 PMChrisI, you should read Asa's third sentence again ;-)
Posted by: Michaël on January 9, 2005 01:42 PMMichaël, thanks. :-)
Posted by: ChrisI on January 9, 2005 11:15 PMCould be because everyone got new computers for x-mas as well.
Posted by: Brent on January 10, 2005 10:26 PMMany computer magazines are monly editions and they needed some time to get the vstory edited and do some real testing. I have seen some editins for January with Firefix vs. IE tests announcements on the front page.
Posted by: Paul on January 11, 2005 07:32 AMIt could be due to schools resume classes in January,and students who are required to use computer in school found that Firefox is a better browser. Furthermore, more and more people and businesses have heard about the latest release by the second week from friends,relatives,family members,publications,press releases and other sources, and people probably have heard a very good feedback about the browser. So as soon as the news spread out to millions of people,thus, resulted the downloads to spike.
Posted by: Jenny on January 12, 2005 08:48 AM