Firefox 4: 100 million downloads in 1 month | Hacker News Reader

Firefox 4: 100 million downloads in 1 month

glow.mozilla.com

102 pointsmelling58 comments

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.

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!

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

As an extension-developer, I'm wondering about the Aurora strategy. They move forward with nightly and beta, but I did not found anything about what Aurora would do to the user profile, or what would happen to extensions in Aurora.

I guess what I'm trying to say... if they want more people join those channels, fix extensions, or at least push some emails through the mailing list with infos about that.

There is an extension to install extension independent of their version-range, but maybe that extension should be build into Aurora.

A fast release cycle is nice, but unless mozilla takes care of the extensions, it'll fail.

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.

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.

Wait, what's 'Aurora'? I'm using Nightly, which is the new name for Minefield. It's sporting a spiffy new logo which looks a lot like the Aurora logo.

It is the channel (http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/channel) in between Nightly and Beta. Changes get pushed from Nightly->Aurora->Beta->Firefox.

I think I've seen it described as something of a "blessed nightly".

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.

Maybe you could compile it yourself?

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/)

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.

check out https://crash-stats.mozilla.com/products/Firefox

> 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.

"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."

The native OS typography engine, you mean? Firefox uses the native text rendering stack on every platform it supports.

"And the terrible usability issues."

Like what?

> The native OS typography engine, you mean? Firefox uses the native text rendering stack on every platform it supports.

That's interesting, because every other browser I've ever used on my WinXP system (including Firefox up to 3.6) could display a 'T' followed by another letter without screwing up the positioning, as can every other piece of software I use on the system for that matter.

I suspect you are mistaken, and Firefox 4 is actually using something other than vanilla Windows typography where it didn't before.

> Like what [terrible usability issues]?

Well, just off the top of my head...

They messed up just about everything on the address/history/awesome/whatever bar: refresh is now a tiny button on the other side of the screen, home is even further over squashed between icons for extensions, you are supposed to realise (presumably through some divine revelation) that holding down the mouse button over the back icon is how you jump back by more than one page, there is a tiny, almost invisible arrow on the right of the tab line that shows all tabs and lets you open a Tab Groups page with a weird UI that doesn't fit in at all, etc.

They moved "Bookmark all tabs" from an obvious place on the Bookmarks menu to the context menu when you right-click a single tab. (A Google for "Firefox 4" "bookmark all tabs" currently returns nearly 30,000 hits.)

Go to Tools|Add-ons with nothing open and you have no obvious way back to a regular browser tab.

Autocomplete of password fields on forms seems to be unreliable.

I'll stop there, because I think the point is made well enough.

Firefox 4 still uses GDI on Windows XP for font rendering. I'm surprised, because the majority of the complaints came from its switch to DirectWrite on Vista and 7; DirectWrite still has display issues, though they're Microsoft's problem, not Mozilla's.

Also, try right-clicking the back icon, rather than holding down the mouse button. And using the toolbar's Customize system to move Refresh and Stop and Home wherever you want them.

> Firefox 4 still uses GDI on Windows XP for font rendering.

It also now uses an OSS library, HarfBuzz, to position the glyphs.

The kerning problem is well documented, e.g., see here:

http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?f=39&t=21588...

> Also, try right-clicking the back icon, rather than holding down the mouse button.

Sure, you can get the list either way, but why change from the widespread convention of having a down-arrow for a drop-down list as earlier versions did? The newer version is less discoverable, and making that sort of change without a good reason is just poor usability, pure and simple.

> And using the toolbar's Customize system to move Refresh and Stop and Home wherever you want them.

I hadn't even realised Firefox 4 still had such a Customize option until you mentioned it. To activate it, I have to navigate my mouse cursor to a region about 3-4px wide (on my 1920x1200 screen) between some of the areas on the bar, and right-click, even if the mouse cursor has already changed to the left-right arrow in some of those places. Once again, this is just poor usability (as is moving the buttons around in the first place when upgrading from an existing Firefox 3 installation that had them in a different place where they could still go).

What you're complaining about is called "kerning pairs" and is considered to be superior text layout technique. Most professionally laid out text in print uses this. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kerning. Perhaps you aren't used to it.

I'm well aware of kerning, thanks. Firefox 4 is simply getting it wrong on WinXP systems, closing up far too aggressively after 'T' and sometimes other letters like 'Y' in many fonts commonly used in web design. (See the link I posted earlier for screenshots.)

> 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.

Firefox is in the process of being made multi-process; they've successfully achieved that for Fennec, the mobile version, and will eventually port that code back to the desktop Firefox.

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.

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.

Just a bit of commentary... Note that it's not "one process per tab". Chrome has "process-per-site", and "process-per-tab" (where a "tab" is not one tab, but a bunch of related tabs.)

https://sites.google.com/a/chromium.org/dev/developers/desig...

In general, IPC is slower than threading--Every time you switch processes you have to flush the TLB, as opposed to switching threads, which only has context switching overhead.

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

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

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

Gmail and Calendar for me.

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

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.

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.

It probably has more to do with a lot of asian companies imposing tight restrictions on what can/cannot be installed on work computers rather than a microsoft-centric tech culture.

Here is a pretty interesting blog post from Gen Kanai (a mozilla-guy) about Indonesia:

http://blog.mozilla.com/gen/2010/06/29/mozilla-in-indonesia-...

> Asia has a pretty Microsoft-centric tech culture.

Which is a good thing for Microsoft but a bad thing for Asia.

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

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

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.

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

Please file a bug about your crash.

Good for them, but FF4 crashes on me every day. Very annoying, especially compared to FF3 that never did that.

(I work at Mozilla)

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

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......

What extensions do you have installed?

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? :)

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/

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...

The top 1 crash in Firefox crash stats...

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.

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...

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.

Thanks for the reply. The URLs are all different, but the actual reports I have trouble accessing as it keeps saying "failed to retrieve, retrying in 30 seconds" or something along those lines. The last entry in about:crashes points at http://crash-stats.mozilla.com/about/throttling, which is the point I stopped bothering with submitting crash reports.

Here's the full list:

  bp-89403086-162a-4bb6-aa8d-4f3672110410 10/04/2011  9:12 AM
  bp-1b51cb2c-edf3-4ec0-8911-9a62c2110409 09/04/2011 11:22 PM
  bp-f44d6982-6157-4971-870a-a137e2110409 09/04/2011 10:47 AM
  bp-390a9e42-76b3-413b-a407-3a2af2110409 09/04/2011  5:58 AM
  (went on vacation)
  bp-2aa52c04-08fd-4b23-a64a-44d042110328 28/03/2011  7:30 AM
  bp-1938940f-6d8d-4837-bdb8-fe90b2110327 27/03/2011  9:33 PM
  bp-a1a9adb5-5b15-41d9-a3b5-50d3a2110327 27/03/2011  7:51 AM
  bp-1690fc50-4d6b-4ee3-9888-9cdc12110326 26/03/2011  7:48 AM
  bp-f2949323-b92f-4f00-b1ff-613312110325 25/03/2011 11:54 PM
  bp-81d190ba-c27d-4eb0-b859-5ecd12110325 25/03/2011  8:39 PM
  bp-0bcfa35d-cc64-46ec-b85a-3022b2110323 23/03/2011  8:32 AM
  bp-d57a9376-47cd-4864-897b-982582110322 22/03/2011  7:34 AM

From the ones that loaded, it looks like you've been hitting this bug:

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=605290

If you're on Windows, you could help by capturing a minidump, since it looks like they don't have much useful information at the moment:

https://developer.mozilla.org/Capturing_a_minidump

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

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

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.

Ouch.. I certain didn't work on the glow project to be "gloating". Note that we aren't counting automatic upgrade downloads, only ones that appear to be from a user clicking a link somewhere to download the installer or manually checking for updates and installing it.

The site is just sitting there, we aren't shoving it down people's throats or forcing them to pay attention to it.

Personally, while I think the site was a fun thing to do, I am working on moving away from paying attention to downloads, regardless of user intent or automatic upgrade because it isn't as useful of a metric as looking at actual # installations or usage.

Trying to compare the Firefox 4 downloads to Chrome automatic upgrades doesn't make a lot of sense. It would be better to compare to new users downloading Chrome, but I don't believe that data is shared at the same level of detail as what Mozilla is doing with Glow.

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

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?

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.

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.

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