Somewhere on Sunday evening, we passed the 3-million-downloads barrier for Sunbird and Lightning downloads in total. That’s an increase of nearly 600,000 total downloads since we started the download counting exercise on September 12, 2007 nearly three months ago.
At the moment we have 1,784,000 unique Sunbird downloads and 1,221,000 unique Lightning downloads. Sunbird has been around longer than Lightning, so the lead is to be expected. These numbers do not incorporate the downloads of people who updated Lightning via addons.mozilla.org or via the automatic update service in Sunbird.
Some additional information:
- Sunbird 0.3 is still the most popular release with 596,000 total downloads
- Sunbird 0.3.1 comes second with 494,000 downloads
- Sunbird 0.5 is hard on the heels of 0.3.1 with 474,000 total downloads
- Sunbird 0.7 has been downloaded 193,000 times since its release five weeks ago. Furthermore 137,000 installations of Sunbird 0.5 have been updated to 0.7, so the total numbers of Sunbird 0.7 downloads is at 330,000 at the moment.
We currently do not have any information about the number of different Lightning releases in the wild.
Let me use the opportunity to say “Thank you” to all our users and supporters. We couldn’t have done this without you. We hope to bring you a great 0.8 release soon (hopefully with even more downloads).
Thank you too for making Sunbird in the first place. :-)
I eagerly await the release of 0.8 and beyond!
Keep up the good work!
Lightning performance on remote ics-files got really bad :-( Have you changed something? Or can someone confirm this behavior?
First off congrats to the Sunbird/Lightning team!
However, to confirm the behavior for thcip, I too have noticed a performance degradation when using remote ics-files (I’m accessing Google calendar).
Hi,
It is not only remote ics files that slow down the TB start-up and Lightning loading itself. The same behaviour is in case of local ics files!
yes, it’s a shame :-( Using ics files got insane slow. Looks like a bug.
The performance of 0.7 was a huge decline. It performs so bad that I have lost most of my interest in following Sunbird development, which I have been doing for several years now. The 0.2 version performed much better.
EDIT:
I forgot to mention something. To deal with the performance, lately I have been deleting ALL past events and only making events a week or two in advance. I am also using Minimize To Tray (+ MMT Enhancer) to make it seem as though startup is faster, since this way it is running all of the time.
So as you can see I am adapting to the terrible performance. I am confident that the developers will address this over time and by the time 1.0 comes along this calendar software will be top notch.
Keep up the great work developers.
yes, ics-performance got so bad, that our company stopped using lightning/sunbird 0.7 and switched back to the 0.3x versions.
We well stop using sunbird because there is no solution for
* Bug 329570: concurrent editing ICS & CalDAV calendars by multiple users can lose data
* Bug 369287: Large calendars with many recurring items slow down the app
We have used sunbird since Ver 02., which was very fast.
Nobody wants to solve the essential bugs in sunbird software.
Interesting. I thought it was something in my setup that was causing Sunbird/Lightning to be so slow. It is vindicating to know that I’m not the only one seeing it.
That said, let’s not forget how much progress has been made in the last year or so. I’ve been eagerly watching this project and it is getting better all the time.
Perhaps the next round of bug fixes for Sunbird/Lightning could focus around performance improvements.
The concurrency bug (bug 329570) would be nice, but I think performance improvements would help more users.
yes, the bugs 329570 and 369287 are a major problem. Looks like we need to go back to outlook in january, our managers are not amused about the calender performance (and the resulting crashes) :-( They didn’t like outlook and were glad to gut lightning, but it is due this bugs really unusable :-/
The correct Bug# is 362987 for ‘Large calendars with many recurring items slow down the app’.