Back in the day when Elvis could enter the building without turning sideways, coating himself with WD40 and wriggling in, there was a saying, “500,000,000 Elvis fans can’t be wrong” (based on disputable record sales). Totally valid or not, it’s hard to argue with those types of numbers. The big “E” has sold a ton of vinyl, tape, and digital media…and still does…from that Heartbreak Hotel in the sky (or spaceship or secret room on the top floor of Graceland if you believe the conspiracy theories.)
So what else is significant about 500M? Aaron shot me this link to a blog post today. It was authored by Mozilla’s Mary Colvig, announcing the 500,000,000th download of Mozilla’s excellent browser, Firefox. I like how she tied in the milestone with a challenge to donate 500M grains of rice in one day through www.freerice.com (powered by FastServers.Net, btw)
In just a few short years, Firefox has reached this lofty number which by all indications, will continue to grow at a rapid clip. Some experts are touting a 10 to 12% gouging of Microsoft’s share of the browser market in the past couple of years with slow but steady growth each year. I wouldn’t be surprised to see this trend continue in the near future, especially with Netscape Navigator joining the other unsupported, no longer patched software on the Isle of Misfit Apps as of the first of this month. It turned out to be advantageous for Mozilla that AOL, after trashing and crashing Navigator, would finally burn the project, leaving Firefox (and the true spirit of the project) to fill in the gap.
I remember the first time I was introduced to Firefox through a friend. Right away the quick and easy install surprised me. I’d gotten so used to the sweaty palmed marathon sessions attempting to download and install previous versions of IE over a 56K dial up connection that I stocked up on provisions, bolted the doors, and hunkered down for a wasted weekend. Heaven forbid that I would forget to disable call waiting and get that connection breaking telemarketing call 4 hours into the download. With Firefox, I was back to wasting time on the Internet with my new browser within minutes.
There’s still a healthy debate about which browser is better. I’m sure that will go on for some time to come. Below are a couple of comparisons that I ran across while researching this post:
http://reviews.cnet.com/4520-10442_7-6656808-2.html?tag=btn
http://www.bbspot.com/News/2005/01/firefox_vs_internet_explorer.html
When I came to work for FastServers.Net, my laptop was set up with Firefox. It is by far the browser of choice with my coworkers. I have had very few issues with it and enjoy the easy add-ons and plug-ins that are available. In a very short time the little blue “e” on my desktop was sitting there, lonely and abandoned...so lonesome, it could cry. From what I’m seeing, Firefox is TCB, man…TCB.
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