Firefox 3.6 Upgrade Offer – An Early Success

Ken Kovash

17 responses

Late last week, Mozilla pushed a Firefox 3.6 upgrade offer to people on older versions of Firefox.  Here was the actual offer:

What has been the impact in just a few short days?

Looking at the chart below, you’ll notice that the percentage of all Firefox users on Firefox 3.6 increased dramatically in recent days.  Late last week, the percentage of users on 3.6 stood at roughly 23%, and as of yesterday that number had climbed to 43% (btw, that 20% pick up translates to roughly 75 million total people who made the switch — that’s huge!).  Past major update offers have generally converted in the ballpark of 10% to 20% of users, so this most recent push has definitely had a substantial impact.

And below is one further way to interpret these recent numbers.  Looking at the launches of Firefox 3, Firefox 3.5, and Firefox 3.6, we considered how quickly each latest & greatest grabbed usage share from its predecessor.  You’ll notice that the shapes of the 3.0 and 3.6 curves (blue and green) look almost identical… the only difference being the timing of the first offer/advertisement being pushed (note: there was an issue with our early 3.5 update offers, hence the red curve seems to be missing the same upward spike).

17 responses

  1. Cristian wrote on :

    Fantastic!….I’m using Firefox 3.6 and it’s the best web browser…..I LOVE IT !

  2. Wladimir Palant wrote on :

    Sadly, this update offer didn’t seem to have a significant impact for Firefox 3.0 users. Of course, these are people who ignored several update offers already. Still, I hoped that the wording of the new offer would prove more successful.

  3. gman wrote on :

    How come so many are still on fx 3.0. eek!

  4. Tomer Cohen wrote on :

    Please note that the 3.0 branch seems steady, even while the recent upgrade announcement targeted to both 3.0 and 3.5. This is a pattern I am seeing after every release – people doesn’t like new features in the new version (for example the tabs behavior) or they have some problems with it (crashes etc.). These users won’t upgrade to newer versions and will stay on the old version for some time, maybe even until someone will convince them to.

    How do you recommend making less people suffer from upgrades? I think we should publish more surveys and ask more people for their advices, because these users won’t use beta versions but more likely have something to say on this subject.

  5. AndersH wrote on :

    So is anybody looking into why the upgrade offer isn’t being shown to the firefox 3 users? I think I saw the problem at some installation (where the “check for updates…” did nothing on a firefox 3). Perhaps it was installed using the admin account, but only used as a regular user. What OS’es are firefox 3 users using?

  6. Frank wrote on :

    Sorry but I have to say that the 3.6 Firefox causes a lot of problems on my mashine.
    It is extreemly slow – espechially to open Links in a new wintow takes nearly a minute…
    I’ll uninstall it and reinstall the 3.5 Firefox.
    🙁

  7. patre wrote on :

    Is it possible to auto-upgrade FIrefox so Firefox use allways the latest stable version?

  8. moloh wrote on :

    Can EU ballot screen have impact on those stats?

  9. Keith wrote on :

    Firefox 3.6 is causing problems on my Windows Vista machine. Clicking a button sometimes results in a page refresh (the button’s purpose isn’t to refresh a page) and sometimes doesn’t load the page contents (I get a blank page). I’ve uninstalled 3.6 and back on 3.5.8. With the older version, I don’t have any problems. Anyone else experiencing this?

  10. nikkie wrote on :

    whenever i try to install it it wont work!

    ><

  11. Martin Hruška wrote on :

    I don’t like this “upgrade begging”. Just install all of them the latest version automatically! Just like Chrome do it. Power users could turn it off somewhere in about:config and that’s it.
    Do you want to repeat Microsoft’s mistake with IE6, which is going to be here forever just because there were no automatic upgrades?

  12. Michael Newton wrote on :

    Martin may have a point. There’s this attitude among open source developers that total user choice is the ultimate goal to strive for. But Firefox was created partly as a backlash against this: I remember well the 400 options in the Mozilla preferences panel, and the fight to simplify it! Perhaps letting the user choose to remain on an unsupported, insecure platform should not be an option?

    I wonder how many of those on 3.0 are there for a reason, versus people who were told “IE is bad, use this” by their kids or grandkids and don’t want to update because they’re scared of breaking something?

  13. Feross Aboukhadijeh wrote on :

    I agree with the sentiment of many of the other commenters. I usually frown on automatic updates because they take choice away from the user. However, I think that in the case of a web browser — the one piece of software besides the OS that you absolutely must keep up-to-date — automatic updates are a good thing. A simple option to disable automatic updating will make most techies happy, while keeping the large majority of non-techies using a secure and supported browser.

    When I come home from college to visit my parents, I’m always amazed at how much software on their computers need updating — Windows, Java, Firefox, and more. It would be nice if I didn’t have to update all these myself every few months. 🙂

    I’m curious to hear other people’s thoughts on this.

  14. Bryan J Smith wrote on :

    Martin — try managing 10,000 Linux desktop profiles and seeing prefs.js break. 😉

  15. rlesan wrote on :

    When I upgraded Firefox, I lost the Klondike solitaire game from
    the add-ons – – – Why?

  16. Komputery wrote on :

    FF rox hard 🙂

  17. nengah sutama wrote on :

    Firefox is the best