Day 6 Thoughts

Quickie thought: how effective can Firefox plugins really be for many projects - especially those that require a large non-geek percentage? And what if IE were to allow easy compatibility with plugins? Consider the following back of the envelope calculations:

-25% of Internet users use Firefox. Estimates are that this is about 270 million users.

-The latest statistics from Mozilla show that there are about 200 million add-ons in use total. But that's clearly not evenly distributed. I can't find the number, so let's wildly ballpark it and say that the average add-on user is using four add-ons (the Stanford computer in Room 280B is clearly using way more...), which means there are 50 million people that really use add-ons.

That means that if we take the roughly billion people who are estimated to be on the Net (based on the marketshare above of Firefox), about 5% even have the capacity to change their user experience with a Firefox extension.

I don't know what the implications of this are - anyone else have a deep thought? - but I think it's worth remembering that those who desire to change their Internet experiences this way are a small minority of users. If IE decided to open up to extensions, though - and if there was some way to translate existing Firefox extensions over to that platform - we might have a whole new ballgame... Jharrow 23:28, 12 January 2010 (UTC)