Ubuntucat

Unless you keep up with tech news, you may have missed it, but this past Tuesday was “download day,” in which Mozilla was hoping to set a world record for downloads by encouraging its users to download Firefox 3 on its release day.

I don’t think there was actually a previously held world record, and I’m not sure how meaningful the 8 million number means. It doesn’t mean there are 8 million users, only 8 million downloads. I myself, did three downloads that day. There was someone on the Ubuntu Forums who did seven downloads. There may have even been people writing scripts to download Firefox. Who knows?

But let’s just say there were 8 million unique downloaders. So what? According to Internet World Stats, only a little more than 1/5 of the world population has internet access. That means only 0.6% of internet users downloaded Firefox on download day. If we were to assume that the entire world had internet access, that’d drop the percentage down to 0.1% of users who downloaded that day.

Those numbers aren’t very encouraging. Actually, they aren’t discouraging either. They’re pretty much meaningless, as we know the Firefox web browser marketshare is anywhere between 10% and 50%, depending on the country.

All it means is that most Firefox users had no clue there was a download day. They just went about their daily lives actually using Firefox instead of re-downloading it. Still, it was a good publicity stunt… at least for those who do read the tech news. It made the front page of the technology section of Google News practically every day this week. I don’t think any download record will ever mean anything, but you’ve got to hand it to those Mozilla folks for getting some good hype.

I like Firefox. I use it at work. I use it at home. I get annoyed when I have to use other people’s computers and they don’t have Firefox installed. I have to say, though, as a three-year Linux user, that Firefox on Linux sucks, and that there’s absolutely no good reason for this suckage.

Here’s what sucks about Firefox on Linux:

• Flash crashes. Yes, I know this is an Adobe problem and not a Firefox (or Ubuntu or whatever distro you use) problem, but it’s still a problem, and it’s annoying. It sucks. There are generally times of stability. Every now and then, though, Flash will crash on you. I’ve found this often happens when you have a lot of tabs open and try to close the last tab that’s open that has Flash embedded in it.
• Tab jumping uses Alt instead of Control. In Windows, it’s cool to jump to the fifth tab by pressing Control-5 or to jump to the second tab by presing Control-2. In Linux, you have to press Alt-5 or Alt-2. Not as cool. It makes for awkward hand positioning, where I have to took my thumb or pinky under my hand.
• Click doesn’t select the whole URL. This doesn’t bother me that much, as I generally use keyboard shortcuts (F6 or Control-L), and I know the setting can be changed in about:config, but a lot of new users get confused and frustrated by this behavior, and it’s annoying for it not to be the default.
• Flash interrupts scrolling. If you have a middle-scroll button or finger-scroll touchpad, your cursor will stop dead in its tracks when it hits an embedded Flash element. Doesn’t happen in Windows, just Linux.

I guess that’s it. It’s not as bad as I thought it would be—a rather short list, but the Adobe Flash-related ones are particularly annoying. Ah, Adobe…