Download Numbers of Camino

Since everyone else seems to be doing it, I thought I’d give out some download numbers of Camino releases.

Below is a graph which shows how many downloads we’ve had over the course of our releases.

The table above (for those of you who don’t wish to count) totals a little over 2.25 million downloads.

Notably missing is Camino 1.0. Sadly, when we shipped Camino 1.0, we weren’t yet in Bouncer (download.mozilla.org), which is the best way for a mozilla.org product to track their downloads. The estimates we received of Camino 1.0 downloads put them in the neighborhood of 350,000.

The numbers above also don’t include the, uh, “wonderful” download sites that link directly to a specific mirror instead of to our download.mozilla.org URLs, thus bypassing the mirror network. Over the course of time, we’ve had them correct links. Nevertheless, they mess them up every release. Counting in those downloads, we estimate an additional 300,000 1.0 and later downloads.

Finally, I’ve intentionally left out Camino 0.8.x both because it wasn’t in bouncer and because it’s so old. That said, some of our users are still on 0.8.x – mostly users who are on Mac OS X 10.1.

Taking all of those numbers above, in total, we’ve received approximately 2.9 million downloads of Camino 1.0 and later.

Sadly, the graph above also shows that most of those users aren’t upgrading, running older versions of Camino instead of the latest release. We’ve done some work on our start page to alert users when they’re running an old version of Camino, but people often change their start page. In Camino 1.6, we’ll have a software update mechanism built using the popular Sparkle framework. (Thanks to Stuart Morgan who wrote the Camino code to make this possible.) You can expect an alpha release of Camino 1.6 in the next week or two.

In terms of active users, we have fairly solid sources that tell us our user base is around (probably just below) 400,000 daily active users. Since we don’t have an update system yet (again: coming soon!), we can’t confirm those numbers, but they’re definitely a good estimate. Given an estimated 24 million Mac OS X users (Steve quoted 22 million in June; 19 million the August before), Camino market share would be around 1.6% of Mac users.

Check out Smokey Ardisson’s blog post for more on what various members of the Camino team have been doing.

Oh, and speaking of releases, expect Camino 1.5.4 this week.