

Firefox 4: 100 million downloads in 1 month - melling
http://glow.mozilla.com/

======
blntechie
Firefox 4 is a great success considering the difficulties, delays and stumbles
between the 3.5 and the 4 release.

I used Minefield (and now Nightly) all through the FF4 development and really
considered at one point the project has become victim of scope creep. Was
worried about my favorite browser getting pushed into secondary choice for
many by Chrome, but the entire Firefox team pulled back and did deliver an
awesome release.

~~~
sliverstorm
Seriously, I'm impressed by the recovery. I tried FF4 about halfway through
their test releases, and I found it unusably bad (and I use a lot of beta and
alpha software).

Now it's my favorite again. Great job, FF team!

------
melling
It would be great if everyone on HN joined the Firefox and Chrome dev
channels. I'm sure it would help with the aggressive release schedules.

<http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/channel/>

<http://dev.chromium.org/getting-involved/dev-channel>

~~~
lambda
I've been using the Chrome dev channel as my primary home browser for the last
few months (maybe even a year or so by now). It's quite stable; I've only
encountered one or two significant problems in that entire time, and they've
been resolved pretty quickly. It's pretty nice, I keep noticing small little
new features and almost every time someone posts a link to some cutting edge
demo, my browser already supports it.

~~~
yesbabyyes
Me too - if you are running Ubuntu, it's really easy to stay up to day with
nightlies or dev releases via the respective ppa:s.

------
rasur
I enjoyed the way those idiots* still using PowerPC got fooled into thinking
FF4 would continue support for that ridiculous architecture because they ran
the FF4 betas perfectly well.

[*] Yes, I am counting myself in this set.

~~~
udp
Maybe you could compile it yourself?

~~~
rasur
That's probably going to have to be the way forward for me, I concur.

Edit; My mistake: Apparently there's TenFourFox, which I had missed. I'll stop
my whining now..

(<http://www.floodgap.com:80/software/tenfourfox/>)

------
pdenya
Any data available on the # of crashes in the last month? FF4 is great in
every way except the huge memory footprint and the fresh bugs.

~~~
Silhouette
> FF4 is great in every way except the huge memory footprint and the fresh
> bugs.

And the typography engine that does kerning so badly that it renders several
letter combinations in normally clear fonts literally illegible at smaller
sizes used by many web sites.

And the fact that they still haven't properly fixed Java applets.

And the terrible usability issues.

And worst of all, the fact that for all the cute gimmicks with tabs, it still
runs everything in the same process, which is a fundamental robustness,
security and performance problem that every other major browser fixed years
ago.

I write browser-based code for a living, and IMNSHO Firefox 4 is without
question the worst of the major browsers on any major OS today as far as
technology goes. Such redeeming features as it does have come almost entirely
from third party extensions.

~~~
lambda
> every other major browser fixed years ago

Chrome and IE are multi-process (though IE provides less protection as more
tabs are included in the same process). I don't think that Webkit2, the multi-
process Webkit that Safari will use, has been released yet. I believe it's
intended to be released with Safari 6, whenever that happens. I don't believe
that Opera is multi-process. So, out of the 5 major browsers, two are multi-
process, one is in the process of being made multi-process, and two are not.

~~~
Silhouette
No offence to Opera, but I don't consider it a major browser when it has about
1-2% market share depending on who you ask.

I confess to being wrong about Safari, though, if you consider its 5-9% enough
to count: I first saw details of WebKit2 about a year ago, and hadn't realised
that it's not going in until Safari 6, which in turn isn't expected until OS X
Lion some time this summer.

Nevertheless, I stand by my original point: IE, Firefox and Chrome between
them represent by far the lion's share of the browser market, and IE and
Chrome have both had a separate process model for some time now.

~~~
lambda
I consider IE, Firefox, Chrome, Safari, and Opera all as major browsers. Sure,
Opera only has 1-2% global market share; but consider the fact that 1-2%
global market share means somewhere in the neighborhood of 20 million users
(assuming estimates of 2 billion global internet users is correct). I consider
that a fairly significant browser.

Also, there are markets in Europe where that percentage is much, much higher.
And those European markets are generally a lot more relevant to me than China
(and to an extent other Asian countries like South Korea), where a lot of the
IE usage comes from. Due to the greater internationalization, cultural, and
regulatory barriers in China, it's not a market that interests me all that
much.

I generally consider the major browsers to be ones which have their own
rendering engines (though Chrome and Safari share one, they both do
significant development of that engine and each have their own JavaScript
interpreters), actively attempt to be compatible with the entire public web,
participate in the web standards process, introduce innovations to the web
platform which are later adopted by other browsers, and have a significant
number of worldwide users or users in major markets. IE, Firefox, Chrome,
Safari, and Opera all meet those criteria.

------
neovive
Definitely enjoying FF4. I'm still wondering how I ever did without the "Pin
as App Tab" option.

~~~
sgreenwood
What pages do you find most useful to pin as an app?

~~~
neovive
GMail, individual Google Docs, Twitter, HN, Documntation (JQuery, JavaScript,
etc.).

------
jwuphysics
That's amazing. I'm surprised Asia hasn't even reached twenty million
downloads, though.

~~~
w1ntermute
Asia has a pretty Microsoft-centric tech culture.

India's probably got the most downloads because of the large IT industry
there. There's a large population but most don't have access to computers.
Compare that to China, where many more people have access to computers, but
the Firefox 4 download rate is much lower.

Indonesia's the exception - Firefox has a share of something like 80%. No idea
how that happened.

Japan's pretty tech savvy as well and has a high rate of technology
penetration.

~~~
wyclif
Asia _is_ pretty MSFT-centric, but I was a little surprised that on my trips
to the Philippines, beginning in 2009, I began seeing a lot of Firefox
installations, even Firefox-only, on a lot of boxen in the Internet cafes
there. So it seems the tide is turning.

------
bad_user
Europe is having the lead -- that's pretty cool.

------
mynameishere
Still on 1.5.0.12 right here. No problems but the famous old memory leak.

------
metaprinter
I love ff but hate ff4 for 1.removing the rss button from the address bar 2.my
installation crashes several times a day due to: EXC_BAD_ACCESS /
KERN_PROTECTION_FAILURE 3.certain flash ads play out of order or appear in the
wrong ad spot! I've never seen anything like this on another browser except
ff4

im on mac osx snowleopard btw.

~~~
holygoat
There's an add on to put the RSS button back. Check addons.mozilla.org.

Please file a bug about your crash.

------
huhtenberg
Good for them, but FF4 crashes on me _every day_. Very annoying, especially
compared to FF3 that never did that.

~~~
sayrer
(I work at Mozilla)

Type about:crashes into the location bar, and see if they are all similar.
Paste the URLs back here.

~~~
bear330
My ff4 also crashes "EVERYDAY", sometimes "EVERYMINUTE", I seriously consider
to switch to Chrome, but I still use it even it always crashes. Here is my
about:crashes:

bp-682ee891-e489-4faa-87d9-0e5d52110422 2011/4/23下午 01:34

bp-74dd05b3-8f58-4e07-ba9b-2bfa22110422 2011/4/23下午 01:34

bp-4bb769e8-4851-4433-9f85-b60a32110422 2011/4/23下午 12:52

bp-10707aa1-1636-4a81-8f69-058832110422 2011/4/23下午 12:44

bp-04edd56e-db3a-45c1-8cfe-5bdb82110422 2011/4/23上午 01:37

.......MANY MANY.....

bp-2d469003-dcb9-498e-9f67-b58f22110421 2011/4/22上午 12:53

bp-1ad3daca-bb71-494b-88b9-9fd972110421 2011/4/22上午 12:32

bp-c7701cfa-793b-4b36-b610-111402110421 2011/4/22上午 12:07

bp-bd445659-4a3b-4b46-b809-11f582110421 2011/4/22上午 12:01

bp-7d00ada1-6b01-4d15-8b91-dfc102110421 2011/4/21下午 11:44

bp-81e36a99-7007-43c7-8d9c-3c3192110421 2011/4/21下午 11:44

bp-83a6eb96-0221-450f-93c0-25b7b2110421 2011/4/21下午 11:00

bp-a92673b1-7a13-497f-b459-e9dd12110421 2011/4/21下午 11:00

bp-8d5367f2-132f-4d34-9f12-6de5c2110421 2011/4/21下午 10:29

xpcom_runtime_abort(###!!! ABORT: Main-thread-only object used off the main
thread: file
e:/builds/moz2_slave/rel-2.0-w32-bld/build/xpcom/base/nsCycleCollector.cpp,
line 1195)

I really hope this problem would be fixed......

~~~
trafficlight
What extensions do you have installed?

~~~
bear330
Abobe Acrobat 10.0.1.434

Google Update 1.2.183.39

Java Deployment Toolkit 6.0.240.7

Java(TM) Platform SE 6 U24 6.0.240.7

Microsoft Office 2010 14.0.4730.1010

Microsoft Office 2010 14.0.4761.1000

Shockwave Flash 10.2.153.1

Silverlight Plug-In 4.0.60310.0

Windows Live Photo Gallery 15.4.3508.1109

Wolfram Mathematica 8.0.27.33471 (DISABLED)

mm... Should I disable all "Microsoft" related extensions to try? :)

~~~
capnrefsmmat
That's probably a good idea. My guess is one of your extensions hasn't been
properly updated for FF 4, but I'm not really sure.

Also use Plugin Check:

<http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/plugincheck/>

~~~
bear330
All my plugins are up to date.

I think this is the bug I encountered: [https://crash-
stats.mozilla.com/report/list?range_value=2...](https://crash-
stats.mozilla.com/report/list?range_value=2&range_unit=weeks&signature=mozalloc_abort%28char%20const%2A%20const%29%20%7C%20NS_DebugBreak_P%20%7C%20nsCycleCollectingAutoRefCnt%3A%3Adecr%28nsISupports%2A%29&version=Firefox%3A4.0)

The top 1 crash in Firefox crash stats...

~~~
capnrefsmmat
If you believe that's it, do a thorough check of your system -- the associated
bug report says it's due to malware interacting badly with Firefox.

~~~
bear330
Thanks for your help.

You give me a clue to deal with this problem!

I immediately found this [http://support.mozilla.com/zh-
TW/questions/800955#answer-155...](http://support.mozilla.com/zh-
TW/questions/800955#answer-155360)

And carefully checked all of my extensions. I found a Z extension hide itself
in FF extensions list. Finally I deleted it.

I think this is a good way if FF can give users some clue to deal with crash
problem. It might be a great help. Thank you.

------
dipankarsarkar
Still on chrome and playing with ff4. I do agree the recovery since the test
releases is pretty amazing !

------
dots
It was a supprise when I turn out there is literally zero effort to migrate FF
3.5 to FF4

------
RyanKearney
I still don't understand why Mozilla keeps gloating about how many downloads
Firefox 4 has gotten. When Chrome releases a major update, they don't pull off
some huge PR stunt with a download counter. Not to mention Chrome users update
to the latest version of Chrome much, much faster than Firefox users upgraded
to Firefox 4.

It just feels like Mozilla is trying to be too much like Apple.

~~~
ivankirigin
Mozilla has publicly said that they are shifting to a more chrome-like release
model where the hits come faster.

~~~
RyanKearney
Did they mention if users will still be shown a popup about updating then
asked to restart their web browser after the update is complete or will they
actually get it right like Google and not bother the user at all?

~~~
lambda
Google will bother the user eventually if they don't restart their browser for
a while. And they show a little downwards pointing arrow when an update is
available, but wait on the dialog until it's been a few days (maybe weeks?).
But for most updates, they don't bother the user.

------
090178
I'll give it a try again.

My DL of Firefox 4 gave me a very heavy piece of software eating way too much
resources.

I switch to chrome and hope to get impress enough to come back to firefox.

