Firefox developer Mike Beltzner blogs about the success of Firefox 2’s launch, with had over 2 million downloads in the first 24 hours of Tuesday’s release and a peak download rate of more than 30 downloads per second. That’s some serious bandwidth. Beltzner also looks back on Firefox’s success and discusses why the browser has been so popular.

Apparently, people loves them some Firefox. Within 24 hours of the official launch on Tuesday, there were over 2 million people using Firefox 2, and we were seeing a peak rate of more than 30 downloads per second from our website.
I’ve been thinking a lot about the things that make Firefox popular. It’s obviously more than the sum of our features, since there are other browsers that include more features in the default install. We’ve known that for a while, though. The popularity of Firefox compared to Mozilla Suite (Seamonkey) clearly proved that the design maxim of “less is more” applies to more than just interior decorating. However, people do love their pet features, so I don’t think that being a small-footprint, tightly-focused browser is the only thing that drives Firefox’s popularity.

When talking to John Borland of the MIT Technology Review a couple of days ago, I compared Firefox to the Honda Civic. As he says in the article, it was half in jest … the more I think about the comparison, the more I think it fits. By default, Firefox is a simple, sleek, efficient, reliable and effective web browser. It’s “unpimped” out of the box, focused on the singular task of connecting you with your online destination and providing useful tools that help you get there and do the things you want to do. If you’re the type of person who tinkers, though … well, the sky is the limit. Just like the Honda Civic, a passionate community has grown around tricking out Firefox with mods and tweaks to shape the tool into one that fits the user perfectly.

It’s this combination of simple-by-default, but customizable-by-choice that allows us to provide a tool that is both “less” and “more” at the same time. There will always be ongoing debates about when a specific feature should be included as part of the default package, and that’s a good thing. It ensures that we’re focusing on what all users want, which keeps us attractive when users are making choices about which browser to download. It also ensures that we add features because we believe we should, and not just because we can. Finally, it gives our users a sense of delight and ownership in making their browser their own with various themes, extensions, plugins and tweaks.

In the future, I expect we’re going to see more “play” with add-ons through Mozilla Labs, with an eye towards seeing what sort of radical changes we could make to Firefox without having to actually change the core experience until we’re positive it’s for the better. Users who want to play along can easily experiment with us, and help us determine what the future of Firefox will look like. This is really exciting to me, since it’s clear that a lot of implications of user interface changes can’t really be discovered with classical in-lab usability testing, and are better served by longitudinal analysis of the user experience.

So ride on, Firefox Nation, ride on. Keep it simple, or pimp it out, but definitely join the millions of users who’ve decided to take Firefox 2 for a spin.

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