Asa Dotzler: Firefox and more

That's great news, Asa. Any news on whether there will be a Fx. 1.5 counter feed? I ask only so I can update TickerFox appropriately.

Hope you're enjoying Seoul. Cheers! ~ Kevin

When will auto-update be ready for japanese builds (or any international builds?)?

Asa, does this download count include those who are using RC3? (such as myself).

I don't think it'd be a huge number anyway, but just wondered.

Good work on 1.5, it's great!

Net Applications has posted the stats for November:

http://marketshare.hitslink.com/report.aspx?qprid=3

Firefox went up again; not as much as in October, but I'm not complaining. "Alternative" browsers appear to be on the upswing in general. The November figures cannot represent Firefox 1.5. We will see what the December numbers say.

OS shares appear to indicate that many users are tossing out their old Windows 98 boxes and move to newer machines. The market share for Windows XP goes up, but so does Apples:

http://marketshare.hitslink.com/report.aspx?qprid=5

Who's in charge of SpreadFirefox anyway??? An 'under construction' note on release day, wow...

There should be a surge when each locale version is released too. I expect most UK users won't have been notified of the update yet because en-GB isn't ready yet.

Re: SFx. I've never understood the mentality that says, "We're building something new, so let's take down what we already have." Especially when you're adding something to a site, not pulling down outdated information.

It makes sense to close a building for renovations, because you often have to block access by people who aren't actually involved in the construction. But a website? You can do all your development offline and upload it when you're done! Meanwhile, you've sent a bunch of people away who just might have had reason to stop at your site.

Spread Firefox isn't just a marketing tool to generate buzz -- it's a marketing resource where people get together and talk about how to promote Firefox, combat misinformation, and so on. Those are valuable functions that just aren't happening now -- at the time they're needed the most!

A few days ago, SFx posted a bunch of new banners for an "Upgrade to 1.5" campaign. The graphics themselves are still in place, but there's no way to get a listing of them anymore. I had to pull them out of my browser cache from Tuesday morning in order to post a few on my site. Imagine how many people might have seen the release info on Tuesday, gone over to Spread Firefox to grab updated banners, and posted them -- but couldn't because the page listing the banners was taken down for renovations?

And don't forget people like me who just do apt-get update to get the latest 1.5 release on Ubuntu. You can include the download stats for Ubuntu Dapper (to be released in April 2006) to the number of downloaded Firefox 1.5. :)

Did you have a look at boingboings browser page?

MSIE     28.4%
Firefox  41.4%
Netscape  1.2%
Others   28.8%, including 6.7% Mozilla

2 million downloads in 36 hours? That's gotta hurt the bandwidth, even with all the mirrors...

sfx baffles me.. pulling the whole site down just after the new version has been released!? Why on earth didn't they set it up beforehand?

"sfx baffles me.. pulling the whole site down just after the new version has been released!? Why on earth didn't they set it up beforehand?"

Agreed. I'm still quite stunned. Whatever the reason, it's been nearly two days and that's not good.

@U.S. Sfx is back online! Woo!

I continue to wonder why no one of the Mozilla employees finds the time to update
http://www.mozilla.org/projects/firefox/roadmap.html
when a new version is out...
http://www.mozilla.org/projects/firefox/
could use some updates, too.

By today, I havn't gotten it what's the purpose of the still-offline SFx? Even when online, I can hardly find valuable info about what's going on in Mozilla field. Don't wanna bash it, but does it really help to spread FF and increase the market share?

My colleagues are trying to persuade me to use Fire Fox 1.5. Are the advantages really so great? Can you share your own experience? (examples and the percentage if possible) please...