the numbers game
by Christopher Blizzard
Just in case you missed it somehow, we released IE7 last Wednesday. In the first four days over three million of you have already downloaded the final release. Thank you!
And from Mike Beltzner’s web log:
Apparently, people loves them some Firefox. Within 24 hours of the official launch on Tuesday, there were over 2 million people using Firefox 2, and we were seeing a peak rate of more than 30 downloads per second from our website.
Based on the numbers that the Firefox team is seeing, uptake of Firefox 2 is more or less twice that of IE7. Or as Luis just put it: people who choose browsers choose firefox.
And with that thought, it will be interesting to see what happens when Microsoft adds IE7 as a “high priority update.” Will people compare the download numbers in the same way? Is it the software equivalent of a push poll? For the matter, when we are ready to do automatic updates of Firefox 2 from Firefox 1.5, will people make the same mistakes?
How you interpret numbers matter. I’m happy with the numbers above, since they reflect a real race: what happens when you release upgrades of two similar products in the same space and let people choose or not choose to install them.
Isn’t this starting to look like the Presidential or Party elections? Instead of focusing on what differentiates these browsers, and there _are_ some important fundamental differences, we become referees or spectators to a boxing game: Who will win this round? Or the next? Will there it by a knockout?
I think it devalues the real issues at stake, which is who owns/should own people’s access to the world wide web, and in what form should that be?
As an aside, it seems to me, a bystander, that many open source / free software developers are getting onto the hype train of web 2.0, without considering that that’s how linux, gnome, kde all started and grew, ordinary hackers and people conecting with each other to create some great stuff and new… If there’s anyone who’s had experience in these things it’s you, and you could have some knowledge and wisdom on how to extend that phenomenon to a wider population.
Or maybe it’s just my view from over here, and that’s what it has been happening all along :)
P.S.- I like firefox’s spell checker, even though it marks firefox as misspelled :/.
[...] Update: Christopher Blizzard said it a lot better than me … [...]
There’s a good quote in Mitchell’s web log about this:
Respect for the user is the important phrase here. Mitchell really believes that we should be doing things with people in mind. Respect for their data, respect for their actions and ethos that is reflected through the way that Firefox is designed – both in action (how we build it) and effect (how it’s used.) This is a pretty fundamental part of who we are and it’s something that sets us apart from the rest of the crowd.
Firstly, does that Firefox download count include those of us who installed Ubuntu Edgy, or who acquired Firefox through a Linux distro somewhere? The download count may be much higher than the given estimate.
Secondly, a lot of us installed Firefox on multiple machines (I’ve personally installed it on at least 3 machines running 3 different OSes) so the actual user count may be lower than the download count.
Third, what about those of us who installed both Firefox 2 and Internet Explorer 7?
Of course I only bring this up because I fall into all 3 categories ;)
I think IE downloads are probably hurt by the fact that by upgrading to IE 7 you lose IE 6. I imagine a lot of the people “interested” in a new browser release are those people who work with web browsers.
A lot of those people will be thinking “Well I’d like to try IE7 but I still need IE 6 for development and testing”.
I know IE 6 will be staying on my work desktop for the near future. I installed IE 7 on my personal laptop’s windows partition. Both machines have Firefox 2.
Perhaps in part this still comes down to “respect for the user”. In choosing to push IE so deep into Windows they may have achived a strategical goal but at the expense of user flexibility.