Firefox Download Day: The Numbers Across The Arab Region.
“And the beast shall be made legion. Its numbers shall be increased a thousand thousand fold. The din of a million keyboards like unto a great storm shall cover the earth, and the followers of Mammon shall tremble.”
-from The Book of Mozilla, 3:31
Firefox download day (18th June) was a huge success all over the world. up till about 10 PM Jordan Local Time, a record breaking 8,490,451 copies of Firefox 3 were download worldwide in a single day.
Naturally the U.S lead the pack with around 2,617,307 downloads, followed by Germany with 703,813 downloads, Spain: 304,225 downloads, U.K: 303,236, France: 297,022, and Iran with 260,415 downloads. (Imagine that, Iran at number 6 worldwide, who would’ve known).
The numbers across the Arab world however, were not too encouraging, the most downloads in the Arab world were in Saudi Arabia with 8,326 downloads, followed by the U.A.E with 6,890 downloads, Egypt: 6,001 downloads, Morocco: 4,707 downloads, Algeria: 3,345 downloads, Tunisia: 3,903 downloads, Kuwait: 2,226 downloads, Qatar: 1,509 downloads and Jordan with 1,469. The rest of the Arab countries’ numbers are too trivial to mention.
Now, if we add up the numbers for the top Arab countries mentioned above, they sum up to 38,375 downloads, which frankly is quite disappointing, considering the fact that Israel alone scored about 33,250 downloads. and if you take into account the number of internet users in the Arab world combined compared to Israel… well, you do the math. And to add insult to injury, lets not forget Iran, the country with the 6th most downloads worldwide. we Arabs are way behind, or so it seems.
I am not sure really what to make of this, I imagined there’d be more Firefox supporters in the Arab world, especially in Jordan, but apparently, there aren’t. which is quite sad if you think about it, because if this tells us something, its that the overwhelming majority of Internet users in Jordan, and indeed the Arab world, just don’t care! dare I say even “tech un-aware”.
And I’ll tell you why…
According to This report there are 796,900 Internet users in Jordan as of September 07. Now, to have only 1,360 out of 796,900 care enough to download Firefox is just pathetic. Now, I know that more people will probably download Firefox in the upcoming days, and surely the number of Firefox users in the Jordan in particular and the Arab region in general is much larger, but still this gives us an indication, and something to ponder upon.
- As mentioned, The Numbers above were taken at 10 PM Local Jordan Time, which marks the end time for the download day. statistics from this page. Numbers now have changed and differed and are much higher but will not count for inclusion in the Guinness book of world records.
On a side note: I did download Firefox 3, But I’m not gonna use it yet, I’m sticking with FF 2 for now, since the majority of my favourite FF plugins (and indeed most FF plugins) are not yet FF 3 compatible.
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