Asa Dotzler: Firefox and more

LOL on the t-shirt dude!

You coming to PDX for oscon?

I think those stats should be broken down to the number of inhabitants or number of internet connections. There are quite a few small countries where FF seems very popular. Also I don't trust the stats. It seems strange to me that the downloads/per person are much higher in the US then in Europe, where the site usage stats suggest a much higher FF usage then in the US.

Great campaign success. Firefox is probably the only browser which knows how to do a good marketing.

By browser I mean't team...

Go Turkey!

Incredible! More than 8 million... Thanks Asa and folks for this great success. Marketing and a great community like this is all that it takes to perform such an unbelievable figure. Now go and open that bottle of champagne!

Try to install Firefox 3 twice to MAC OX 10.3, but doesn't work. Later on, I found out 10.4 is mini required. Mozilla should prevent not supported OS to download.

@Morty: Seems that the stats are broken down by the languages of the downloaded software on not by IP of downloader. So there are probably quite a few people who download the English (US) Firefox, although they live some place else.

BTW: Shame on North Korea and Antartica!

Best page for the download counter by far (sorry, way better than the screenshot you took or the Flash map on Spread Firefox) is at http://ffpledge08.appjet.net/

Worryingly, try clicking on the Downloads/Pop column header a couple of times and you'll see that Lithuania's figures look suspiciously like they've been bolstered by automated downloading (script kiddies?). Whilst no other country in the world (even the tiny islands etc.) got close to 2% of the population downloading Firefox 3, Lithuania managed 8.5% of all their citizens...allegedly. For a country of 3.4m citizens to download more than Italy (59.3m) or Canada (33.2m) just rings alarm bells for me.

Does Guinness have methods to detect blatant automated downloading (e.g. looking at agent strings for "wget", "curl" etc. or many requests from the same IP with no referrer in a short period of time)? If not, then they probably should...

Richard, the team that will audit the downloads has all of the tools one could want to verify and Guinness is happy with what they say.

As for Lithuania, I suspect it's just a strange Geo-IP mis-identification. None of the country-specific numbers are "official" since there's really no way to know that except by estimating based on Geo-IP tables. Whether the IP data was off, or our allocating app was off, it's not terribly important, but it's a lot more likely that it's something going on within those bounds than it being a script. Our system is set up to defend against those kinds of threats -- a script that repeatedly downloads can be thought of as an attack, an attempted DOS and we'd kill those pretty quickly.

Regardless, the official vetting of the numbers would identify and remove any fraudulent downloads from the count. Not to worry :-)

- A

I've heard rumors that the reason India clocked only a dismal ~70,000 downloads is because of IP mis-identification.
If this is so, it's really sad because Firefox does enjoy a lot of support in India, but the numbers indicate otherwise. It was disappointing for all those who campaigned on behalf of spreadfirefox.com in India to see such low numbers.

I've heard rumors that the reason India clocked only a dismal ~70,000 downloads is because of IP mis-identification.
If this is so, it's really sad because Firefox does enjoy a lot of support in India, but the numbers indicate otherwise. It was disappointing for all those who campaigned on behalf of spreadfirefox.com in India to see such low numbers.

Alex (who found that FF3 isn't compatible with MacOS 10.3) - fuhgedaboutit, stick to Apple's pre-installed Safari browser, still fastest by far. In tests I've run against FF3 on my iMac G5 Intel, Safari launches in a tenth of the time and opens a bookmarked page in half the time.

It would be fun to have the downloads divided by the number of inhabitants. This would give quite another picture, e.g. Switzerland with currently 106'000 downloads per 7'591'400 inhabitants

Lithuania is a well known cc fraud/cheaters country.

Vygantas: maybe you're one of the cc fraudsters from Lithuania? Your statement is news to me.

Then I guess you're not into ebusiness :-)

Type lithuania + fraud and see all those articles about credit cards, "block nigeria, lithuania to avoid fraud", etc...

I'm in this business.
Try to type any other country + fraud. What is a difference?

downloads count in Lithuania can be real because biggest news portals announced Firefox download day

thank you