Today we launched Firefox 4 for the Android platform. I believe that this is Mozilla's most important release since Firefox 1 and we're going to do to mobile what we did to the desktop starting 6 years ago.
Today is the beginning, but it starts with you and everyone out there who loves Firefox downloading and installing Firefox 4 on your android device. We couldn't have gotten to where we are on the desktop without you and we're counting on you to unleash Firefox in the mobile world now.
A number of people have commented that Firefox 4 download numbers are not really that impressive (even though they gave IE 9's launch downloads a serious thumping) and that what really matters is actual usage. So, with the help of data from StatCounter and NetApplications, I've prepared a little chart that shows Firefox 4 usage also trouncing IE 9's solidly.
(data courtesy of StatCounter's GlobalStats and Net Applications' Global Market Share)
As you can see from the chart, Firefox 4's release kicked off with considerably more excitement and momentum. IE 9's release, which was backed by one of Microsoft's biggest launch marketing campaigns in recent history, had a comparatively weak showing.
So what explains this disparity? It's you all. It's every one of you that downloaded Firefox 4, found it to be awesome, and told all of your friends and family about it. No ad campaign from Microsoft can top that. Keep spreading the word. Firefox answers to no one but you!
Firefox downloads are still screaming. It's been only 4 days and we've already crossed 30 million downloads of Firefox 4. This is simply amazing.
On day one, we did 7.1 million downloads. On day two, that number shot up to 8.75 million downloads. Day three saw 8.1 million downloads. And now day four, which bridges into the normally much slower weekend clocks in at 6 million downloads. Crazy awesome!
There is no doubt that this is the fastest growing version of Firefox and the thanks to that belongs to you all. Thank you for making Firefox such a fantastic browser and thank you for telling all of your friends and your family and your schoolmates and your co-workers. You all are what makes Firefox rock.
On Firefox launch day, you all set the world on fire with more than 7 million downloads of the blazing fast new Firefox 4.
But you didn't stop there. No, you went out and told your friends and your family and your co-workers and anyone else that would listen that Mozilla was back! and that Firefox 4 was again the browser to beat.
And you all did something amazing and unheard of in software. You pushed the day 2 download totals well beyond what you made happen on release day.
Your dedication to upgrading the Web and your social networking to make that happen have not only led to more downloads on day 2 than on day 1, but you helped drive that number to a new high 24 hour high, 8,750,000 downloads -- topping even the amazing 24 hour world record of 8 million downloads that we set with Firefox 3.
Thank you, Mozillians. You all are amazing. Let's keep it going through day 3!
Oh, and in case you want to follow along as we blow through 20 million total downloads of Firefox 4, head over to http://glow.mozilla.org.
update: At the end of day three, Firefox 4 has been downloaded 24 million times! You all really did set the world on fire! Just amazing.
Yes, we shipped! http://firefox.com
Join the Twitter Party: Tweet about Firefox 4 with the #fx4 hashtag and your Twitter avatar will join thousands of others from around the world as part of our logo mosaic.
Post a Facebook Badge: Add one of these awesome Firefox badges to your wall for your friends to see and they'll be encouraged to download Firefox 4.
Get your all new Website buttons: Please update your blogs and websites with our snazzy new Firefox 4 buttons.
Watch downloads live on Glow: Track download stats in real-time and zoom in to view stats for each country, state, or even city. Awesome use of canvas.
At today's Firefox planning meeting, we found no issues that would cause us to create a second release candidate. That means, in all likelihood, that the Firefox 4 RC that you're using now *is* Firefox 4.
Because Microsoft won't support XP users with the imminent release of IE 9, I think the choice is clear.
Firefox 4 is 17 times faster than than IE 8 on SunSpider, the most generous to IE of the popular JavaScript benchmarks. It's even worse for IE on V8bench and Kraken.
Firefox has hardware acceleration, screaming fast JavaScript, and a truly modern Web experience for the hundreds of millions of people who are using Windows XP. The choice is clear. Get Firefox 4
I just saw this photo tweeted out from South by Southwest and I'm really quite surprised. Microsoft's marketing department may be full of FUD and mistruths, but it caught me off guard that they were going to go with trashy sexist objectification of women as their IE9 pitch.
Photo courtesy of my friend Toby on Flickr
What do you all think? Isn't this at least just a little bit trashy and sexist?
update: I want to be clear, my remarks are not directed at the people Microsoft has walking around SXSW giving out coffee. They look like nice kids. It's the shirt that's offensive. (Nevertheless, had my employer asked me to walk around town giving away free drinks wearing that shirt, I'd have definitely said no.)
update2: The more I think about this the more bothered I get. We have a huge gender disparity in tech and there are lots of really thoughtful people spending considerable effort to improve that and here we have Microsoft, one of the largest tech companies in the world, cavalierly pushing a sexist marketing campaign at a major industry gathering -- one that does particularly well compared to other conferences at attracting diversity.
update3: Thank you to the brave women who came into the hostile environment of my comments section (and sorry for that, I really didn't expect it to get ugly) and expressed your points of view. Thank you also to my friend Jono Xia for his comments here.
Q. Should we allow closed or proprietary file formats on the Internet? For example H.264.
Should any "plug-in" be needed?
We should not codify into de jure standards or sit idly by while de facto standards emerge that require licensing fees to build content for, distribute content across, or consume content from the Web.
The Web is too important a part of our global infrastructure to restrict participation to only those that can afford to pay licensing fees.
I'm sure Microsoft is very proud of IE's hardware acceleration but their marketers are taking it a step too far when they lie about Firefox's hardware acceleration and mislead people about their own.
Microsoft is the kind of company that won't be fazed by the unwashed Web masses calling them out for bad behavior (the decade of IE 6, 7, and 8 have proved that) but that doesn't mean we shouldn't do it when appropriate and I think this is definitely one of those cases.
So what is Microsoft's big lie this time around? It's not hard to spot it in their recent blogging and other PR activities: that they alone have "full hardware acceleration".
This is just bullshit marketing speak. It means absolutely nothing. No browser has full hardware acceleration nor should they because not all parts of the browser benefit from running on the specialized graphics processor.
Firefox accelerates Web content on Windows 7 using the same set of Windows APIs IE 9 does and the performance characteristics of this acceleration are very similar on most balanced tests across the two browsers.
There are some tests where IE's acceleration has small advantages over Firefox's and some cases where Firefox has small advantages over IE's. In upcoming releases of both browsers, those small differences will mostly disappear.
There are, however, other tests that make clear that our architectures are different and there are real differences in the performance characteristics of the two browsers. Microsoft tried to lay claim to one of these major advantages with that Santa's Workshop comparison but it's since been demonstrated that the test they're using isn't even measuring hardware acceleration -- it's mostly measuring the DOM and JavaScript performance.
But what really demonstrates the bogosity of their claim to exclusive "full hardware acceleration" is that IE doesn't even accelerate something as basic scrolling a Web page. Firefox 4 does -- and gets about a 10x win over IE 9 in a simple scrolling test.
I don't blame the IE engineers for this. They've done a fine job with IE 9. I predicted long before anyone else that IE 9 was going to be a great release with a lot to be really excited about (especially if you're a Web developer) so I'm really quite happy about the solid progress that team has made, but I'm really unhappy to see Microsoft's marketing yahoos spewing this kind of trash in the lead-up to their release. It doesn't serve users and it's a black eye on all the great engineering that went into IE 9.
Microsoft, I call on you to stop making this wrong claim now. You do not have "full hardware acceleration" and what you do have is less complete than Firefox's. Continuing to lie about both IE 9 and Firefox is a disservice to users and to your own engineering team.
You can get more technical details over at Robert's blog, here and here.
Firefox 4 is looking absolutely stunning on Windows 7 (and Vista, too.) Here are a couple of screenshots to give you a taste if you haven't seen it yet.
This first screenshot shows Firefox 4 in a maximized state, with the tabs in the titlebar area to maximize the space available for page content.
This second screenshot shows Firefox 4 in a restored state, where the titlebar needs to be available for dragging the window.
I'm really excited about how strong this looks on Windows 7 but I'm also thrilled that we've made some solid improvements to the look and feel on Windows XP as well. I'll post some screenshots there soon.
