Hacking for Christ

The total is a bit misleading since it's not the number of unique users or a unique version (not to say this is easy!). The first recent bump seems to coincide with 1.5b1 on 20050908, and the second bump is the 1.0.7 security release about 20050920. My prediction is that 1.5b2 will give another bump and the 100 megadownloads mark will be passed in less than a week.

Then the press can go a nuts over the sort of dodgy number they love. More security releases anyone? :-)

There's nothing wrong with making noise about getting 100m downloads, after all it's hardly as deceptive as some of the "statistics" MS put out (remember the TCO ads?).

Anyway you look at it - 100 million downloads for an OSS products = win. No argument.

@cf, the count only includes downloads of Firefox 1.0.x. So it is not affected by Deer Parks and 1.5 Betas.

It doesn't necessarily imply that the rate of downloads is increasing. If the rate has been decreasing over time and the prediction included an estimation that the rate would continue to decrease then if the rate started to decrease less quickly that would cause the same effect,

If you look at the Firefox Downloads graph at http://ff.asbjorn.it/#h2 you'll see that we've fallen a bit below trend as of late. There's been a slight uptick very recently pushing us a bit back to the trendline, but until we hit it, we can only cross our fingers, look up at the sky, etc.

If there's one thing which can be learned from this, it's that we should release more often than once a year. The download rate is higher because there's more press occurring before, during, and after a new release. More people read about us, so more people make the effort to download. Clearly, the more often we make stable releases, the longer the download rate has to stay at higher levels.

I don't expect the release rate to go up drastically any time soon, but I do expect there will be an effort to release at least a few months earlier for 2.0. (I seem to recall someone mentioning talking at a conference about scheduled deadlines similar to how GNOME does guaranteed 6-month releases, but I don't remember exactly who it was.) I personally doubt the effort will be overwhelmingly successful (i.e., I expect between 1-2 months sooner at most), but at least it'll be a step in the right direction.