OK, cool, Firefox have had their 100,000,000th download of the browser and they are having 200,000 to 300,000 downloads a day.  Pretty big number and I see there’s celebrations at Firefox HQ. 

Great news. 

However, how many of these downloads are update downloads?  See, Firefox is a complete package upgrade and this means that if I have to download three copies per machine in a month because of new releases that patch security issues and I have a system with 10 PCs, then that’s 30 downloads I made in a month.  Conversely, I might download one package and install it on multiple machines.

This is why I don’t trust numbers like this.  Yep, 100,000,000 is a massive number and it sounds impressive – certainly impressive enough to get the attention of the media – but it feels to me a little hollow, like if Microsoft released stats on Windows Update downloads.  Yep, they’d be impressive and yes, I’m sure that the number would be big.  It would also show a commitment to security and so on but it doesn’t say much otherwise.  Likewise with browser downloads.  The activation energy needed to encourage the average user to download something nowadays is low – people download stuff all the time. 

Still, it's an impressive number! But I'd urge caution against looking too much at the numbers - it seems that security needs to have a closer eye kept on it.

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This entry was posted on Thursday, October 20th, 2005 at 10:38 and is filed under PC Doctor's Thoughts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.