Originally found at:ZDNet
Firefox hits 400 million downloads
By David Meyer, ZDNet UK
Tuesday, September 11 2007 05:47 PM
The popular open-source browser Firefox hit another milestone on Friday when it passed the 400 million download mark.
The browser, distributed by Mozilla, appears to be enjoying exponential growth in terms of downloads. From its launch in 2004, it took one year to reach 100 million downloads. A year later, it hit 200 million downloads.
In a message posted on its Web site, Spread Firefox, Firefox’s community marketeers, thanked users for helping to achieve the latest download figures. “With your amazing efforts, Firefox has reached 400 million downloads and demonstrated that not even the world’s most powerful companies can keep people from a better, safer, and faster Web experience,” the team wrote.
It is difficult to judge the exact share of the browser market enjoyed by Firefox. The most recent statistics published by W3Counter suggest that Firefox holds a quarter of the market, but most other organizations releasing such statistics suggest a slightly lower figure.
According to figures released on Friday by US consultancy firm Janco and the IT Productivity Center, Firefox currently has 17.4 percent of the browser market–up 5.6 percentage points in the last year. Also within the last year, Microsoft’s market-leading Internet Explorer browser dropped 9.6 percentage points to a market share of 63.9 percent.
Originally found at: Schrep’s Blog
Mozilla and Mobile
People ask us all the time about what Mozilla’s going to do about the mobile web, and I’m very excited to announce that we plan to rock it. Here’s some information about what we’re planning to do with hiring, technology, partnerships, and products, and how you can get involved. Short summary: we are serious about bringing the Firefox experience and technology to mobile devices.
Why increase Mozilla’s presence in mobile?
* A large portion of the world accesses the Internet from mobile devices, and this will become increasingly true over time (mobile devices outsell computers 20-1). Each Firefox install is an individual choice by a person to download something that didn’t ship by default on their computer. Why not offer that option for mobile devices?
* Firefox the most popular open-source browser on the planet with > 100 million active users. Bringing Firefox add-ons, the Mozilla platform (including XUL), open source, and a large and passionate community to the closed and fragmented mobile platform will do the world some serious good.
* Firefox and Mozilla give device manufacturers the best of both worlds: shared investment in the core open-source project plus the flexibility they need to customize the browser for their devices.
* You can already get a Mozilla-based browser for the Nokia N800 and Firefox is a key part of Ubuntu Mobile and the new Intel Internet Project, and most recently ARM has put serious effort towards Firefox on mobile devices.
* Through Joey, we’ve seen how the desktop and mobile browsing experiences can be bridged to build a better experience for both. Wouldn’t it be great if your bookmarks, history, extensions, etc. from Firefox on your computer just worked on your phone?
Just what are we announcing?
* Mozilla will add mobile devices to the first class/tier-1 platform set for Mozilla2. This means we will make core platform decisions with mobile devices as first-class citizens.
* We will ship a version of “Mobile Firefox” which can, among other things, run Firefox extensions on mobile devices and allow others to build rich applications via XUL.
* Mozilla will expand its small team of full-time mobile contributors to focus on the technology and application needs of mobile devices. In particular two new folks just joined:
** Christian Sejersen, recently the head of browsers at Openwave which has shipped over 1 billion mobile browsers, joined Mozilla Monday. He’ll be heading up the platform engineering effort and setting up a R&D center in Copenhagen, Denmark.
** Brad Lassey just joined Mozilla from France Telecom R&D. He’s already been an active contributor to our mobile efforts and can now focus on Mozilla mobile full time.
These folks will accelerate the tremendous work already done by Doug Turner, Chris Hofmann and the entire Mozilla community. The efforts in mobile will be magnified by all aspects of our kick-ass community in everything from testing, to UI design, to core engineering. Together we will accelerate the development and use of mobile-ready Mozilla technology.
Why now?
* Getting a no-compromise web experience on devices requires significant memory (>=64MB) as well as significant CPU horsepower. High end devices today are just approaching these requirements and will be commonplace soon For example, the iPhone has 128MB of DRAM and somewhere between a 400 to 600 MHz processor. It is somewhere between 10x-100x slower on scripting benchmarks than a new MacBook Pro and somewhere between 3-5x slower than an old T40 laptop on the same wifi network. But rapid improvements in mobile processors will close this gap within a few years. There are chips out there today that are faster than the one in the iPhone and integrate graphics, cpu, and i/o (wifi/3g/wimax) on one die. Intel has recently re-entered this market which will keep things interesting. Most exciting of all ARM has announced that by 2010 devices will be shipping with a processor 8x faster than what’s in the iPhone!
* The user demand for a full browsing experience on mobile devices is clear. If you weren’t sure about this before you should be after the launch of the iPhone.
* We’ve seen through Mozilla on the Nokia N800 and Minimo that it is possible to build a great experience on devices by using the Mozilla code.
* We are wrapping up work on Gecko 1.9 and there is room post 1.9 to make significant changes to the architecture for improved performance and memory use on devices. Things like reducing the use of XPCOM, unifying memory management under MMgc, and other improvements from Mozilla 2 will make Mozilla a great platform for all devices from mobile phones to your desktop. The use of a single source base gives us the leverage that makes OSS work so well.
Is this the right time?
Absolutely! Up until very recently device limitations required writing new mobile browsers from the ground up. Being able to leverage all the investments in the Mozilla platform across both desktops and devices is the right approach. There is far from a dominant player in this marketplace and even the best mobile browsers today have compromises in user experience, performance, and compatibility. There is still *plenty* of room for innovation.
When?
As mentioned above, Mozilla browsers are already available to N800 users and you can use Joey today to extend your Firefox desktop browsing experience to your phone. We’ll continue to invest in Joey and will work closely with partners who want to ship Mozilla browsers today. Mobile Firefox will arrive later (certainly not before 2008).
What about Minimo?
Minimo was an experiment in mapping the desktop browser experience to a specific mobile context. While we don’t currently plan to develop that project further, it has already provided us with valuable information about how Gecko operates in mobile environments, has helped us reduce footprint, and has given us a platform for initial experimentation in user experience.
Does this mean that Firefox 3 will run on my phone?
No. This project is focused on Mozilla technology that will ship after Firefox 3. We’re at least as excited as you about getting Mozilla’s great web capabilities into your hands, literally, but it’s a big undertaking, and won’t be something that we can wrap up in time for Firefox 3.
What mobile devices will Firefox run on?
We haven’t yet determined what our target platforms will be. If you’re a mobile device or software-stack developer, your insight and support will be very helpful in determining which configurations we can and should support in our initial efforts.
How can I get involved?
Join us on IRC at #mobile, in the newsgroups, or ping me. We need your help!
Squarefree.com
Many Mozilla community members, including both volunteers and Mozilla Corporation employees, have been helping to reduce Firefox’s memory usage and fix memory leak bugs lately. Hopefully, the result of this effort will be that Firefox 3 uses less memory than Firefox 2 did, especially after it has been used for several hours.
Memory usage
Federico Mena-Quintero submitted a patch to make Firefox discard decompressed image data after five seconds (bug 296818). ImageLib module owner Stuart Parmenter experimented with a competing idea in bug 386377, but now he plans to help with Federico’s patch. The patch will make image data join text runs in using time-based caching rather than traditional space-bounded caching.
Aaron suggested having an “about:memory” page showing a breakdown of Firefox’s memory use (bug 392351). When I pointed out the bug to Brendan Eich, he excitedly assigned the bug to himself.
Eli Friedman discovered that nsFloatCache was no longer necessary and eliminated most of it (bug 381385).
Memory leaks
David Baron checked in a patch for the last bug that contributed to RLk on Linux, bringing the number of XPCOM objects leaked during this test to zero. Since this test runs on Tinderbox, it’s likely that regressions will be noticed quickly, even if they don’t turn Tinderbox orange.
Robert Sayre created a script to load random pages and see whether they cause leaks. The random URLs come from the Yahoo directory (biased toward older, top-level pages), del.icio.us (biased toward newer, geeky pages), and AltaVista (biased toward pornography). The script detects leaks using trace-refcnt, the same test used by RL; future versions might use trace-malloc in order to catch additional leaks. Robert has caught at least 6 distinct leak bugs using this script, 3 of which have already been fixed. See LeakingPages and bug 394517 for details.
David Baron created a series of patches to the cycle collector to aid in debugging leaks. With this code, DEBUG_CC builds of Firefox can notice when an object “expected to be garbage” is not collected and then explain in detail why it was not collected.
Steve England tested the top 500 web sites, finding two leaks. Later, he tested the top 20 Firefox extensions and found leaks in several of them.
David Baron recorded seven leak debugging screencasts, which you can watch to see how David Baron debugs real leaks.
Kris Zyp found a leak in the JavaScript Engine when using the watch method (bug 394709). Igor Bukanov responded quickly with not only a patch for the bug but also a leak detection patch to enable regression testing of JavaScript Engine leaks. I asked him to modify his patch so I could use jsfunfuzz to test for JavaScript Engine leaks, and he did. (This led me to find several bugs in evalcx, but no additional leaks.)
David Baron got the stack walking code and the stack fixer working on Mac, making it possible to use trace-malloc and the refcount balancer on Mac (bug 336517, bug 392118).
How to help
You don’t have to be a C++ programmer to help find leaks in Firefox.
If you’re a Firefox user, an easy way to help is to browse with a trunk nightly build wrapped in a script that calls leak-gauge.pl when Firefox exits. If it reports that documents or windows leaked, try to figure out how to reproduce the leak and then file a bug report.
If you’re an advanced user, you can do something similar with with trace-refcnt, which detects leaks of all reference-counted objects, not just windows and documents. Build Firefox with the .mozconfig option “–enable-logrefcnt” (or build debug) and run your build with XPCOM_MEM_LEAK_LOG=2. When Firefox exits, it will print a detailed but understandable summary of what types of objects leaked.
If you’re are a C++ programmer and want to help diagnose or fix bugs, check out Performance:Leak_Tools along with David Baron’s screencasts, and hang out in #developers on irc.mozilla.org.
This entry was posted
on Thursday, September 20th, 2007 at 12:23 am and is filed under Mozilla.
You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
Both comments and pings are currently closed.
