Firefox: Millions and millions of downloads...sitting on the shelf
Why go through the bother of sucking up your bandwidth with a download and then not clicking on the icon to install it?
It was a bit distressing to read that despite tens of millions of Mozilla Firefox downloads, 75 percent of all Firefox downloads never get used, according to Mozilla. Mozilla has therefore launched a contest to get input on how to solve this problem.
It's a good move, but I'm frankly dumbfounded by why millions of people would bother to download Firefox...and then do nothing with it. A majority of existing Firefox users upgrade to new versions, or did so with 3.0. So, existing users seem to like Firefox and want to stay with it, helping Firefox grow to roughly 20 percent of the global browser market.
But why are so many downloads - presumably from newbies - left to sit on the shelf?
It would be one thing if millions of people made it to the Firefox download page and then decided to stick with a previous version of Firefox (or Internet Explorer), but why go through the bother of sucking up your bandwidth with a download and then not clicking on the icon to install it?
Any ideas? Or, rather I should say in the spirit of Mozilla's contest, any solutions?
UPDATE: I heard back from John Lilly, CEO of Mozilla, who offered the following explanation:
It's probably not really three-quarters of the downloads that don't get used -- that's what our numbers show, but some of it is due to downloads not finishing, double downloads, people moving from one machine to a new one (where we gain a new user and lose one, but add a download). But it's hard to find actual information in the wild about usage rates of downloaded software a month after download -- we're sharing ours because we can -- but we can't really find any comparable data -- have you seen any?
I haven't, but how about anyone else out there?