The roads I take...

We have just released SeaMonkey 1.1.4, our most recent security release that fixes a few very nasty security vulnerabilities.
If you're still running any older version of SeaMonkey, or even a Mozilla or Netscape suite, get this release now to be sure to not run knowingly insecure code.

And if you're using one of our main 3 links to our official release builds, i.e. those that go to download.mozilla.org, your download gets counted by our download redirect tool called "bouncer".

As already stated previously, downloads of any other builds (.zip or tarballs, other platforms and other languages) are not counted, as well as downloads that are issued directly from FTP servers, or through other means of distribution (Linux distro packages, etc.) - so the real number of SeaMonkey downloads is in the dark to us, but the counts of the three main download links should cover a significant portion of our downloads.

And usually, when I poke the Mozilla build team to add new download links for a release to the bouncer tool, I also ask them for the current numbers.
As of today, when we added the 1.1.4 release, the counted downloads for SeaMonkey versions from 1.0 to 1.1.3 sum up to over 1.8 million downloads already!

The graph below shows a per-version split of those (blue bars and left scale):



1.1.1 ranks highest with 386k downloads - but then, this version also had the longest lifetime (together with 1.0.8) of all releases, it held the title of being the most up-to-date SeaMonkey version for 91 days until 1.1.2 was released.

So I figured ranking the releases might more sense when taking the lifetime of those releases into account - the short 15-day-only timespan until 1.1.3 was followed up by 1.1.4 makes this even more important. What I did was diving the total downloads per release by the days in which that release was the most current one (on its branch) - in the graph above, this is the red line, using the scale on the right side.

The outcome is quite interesting: We started off around 1800 downloads per day for 1.0 and 1.0.1, with a spike to slightly over 3000 for 1.0.2 - but people obviously didn't want to adopt 1.0.3 last summer, it had only about 830 downloads a day. After that historic low, we saw a steady increase of download rates, nearing 5000 downloads/day lately, and 1.1.3 even had 5880 downloads on average in the 15 days it was out. Of course, the alpha/beta releases for 1.1 and those 1.0.x releases that only continued that branch while 1.1 was already out the door are way below the numbers for the most-current releases at any time.

And one last interesting number: In the 550 days since SeaMonkey 1.0 was released, bouncer recorded an average of 3376 SeaMonkey downloads every day!

I think we are on a good way and especially the high download rates for all 1.1.x releases are very encouraging.

As I mentioned here earlier, the default start page for the German versions of SeaMonkey and the Mozilla suite are running from my site, and I have pretty good statistics about relative usage of those application suites in the German market because of that.
While in February I had still almost 2/3 of the hits coming from Mozilla suite and a bit short of 30% from SeaMonkey, in April Mozilla was down to about 55% and SeaMonkey around 37% - and that trend did continue.

Here's a current graph of hit percentages by browsers:


And you'll see from this that it's time to celebrate - SeaMonkey has finally overtaken Mozilla in July!
The July numbers of hit percentage are SeaMonkey leading with 46%, followed by Mozilla with 45%, Firefox is at 4% and MSIE at 1.5% - all others are well below 1% of total hits on the SeaMonkey German site.

A breakdown by versions is also interesting: SeaMonkey 1.1.2 leads with 15.9% followed by 1.1.1 with 15.0%, the strongest Mozilla version is 1.7.12 at 10.6%, followed by 1.7.13 at 6.3%, 1.7.3 at 5.6%, and 1.7.5 at 3.9%. The newest SeaMonkey version, just release on July 19th, is at 3.6% in July's totals already, Mozilla 1.6, 1.7.11, 1.7, SeaMonkey 1.1 and Mozilla 1.7.8 are all still above 2%, all SeaMonkey 1.0.x versions sum up to about 9% of all hits - that's practically all versions of 1.0.7 and below, the 1.0.8 and 1.0.9 which came out post-1.1 are hardly noticeable in the statistics.

This all gives me the impression that the update notification of SeaMonkey surely works better than no notification at all like we had with Mozilla back then. Also, people who stick with some version seem to not even step up to the respective conservative security updates, like the 1.0.x splitting shows. Many people seem to follow the updates we ship though, when they get notified of them, as the decent percentage of 1.1.2 and 1.1.3 shows, but they might not follow them immediately, as the still high 1.1.1 number makes clear.
I hope our move in SeaMonkey 2 to the automatic update system (AUS) also used by Firefox will make people follow the security updates even more closely.

Still, a Gecko percentage of 96% always sounds nice on a site with over 3 million hits per month - with 2% of the rest being bots, 1.5% Trident (MSIE), 0.15% Presto/Opera and 0.08% KHTML (Safari/Konqueror), just if you might wonder where those other competitors are. Sure, this is a Site dedicated to Gecko browsers and holding the default start page of German SeaMonkey and Mozilla, so Gecko domination is of course expected.

As we're already on this topic and we already know that those hits ale almost all from SeaMonkey and Mozilla suite users, let's take a look at the most-used OSes as well:

1. Windows XP - 78.50%
2. Windows 2000 - 8.95%
3. Windows 98 - 2.49%
4. Linux - 2.28%
5. Windows Vista - 1.73%
6. MacOS X - 1.47%
7. Windows ME - 0.97%
8. Windows 2003 - 0.61%
9. Windows NT 4.0 - 0.38%
10. Windows 95 - 0.09%
11. Solaris - 0.03%
12. OS/2 - 0.01%

I've taken the liberty to only use version splits for Windows, and take the sums for others, as well as exclude everything below 0.01% of usage (i.e. below 300 hits this month). XP clearly dominates suite installations by far, but I wondered how low Vista usage seems to be, and how high Win2000 ranks there. This high usage of Win2k likely points to many corporate and university etc. installs being out there.
Another interesting point is that Windows versions below Win2k, which will be dropped by Gecko 1.9 and therefore also SeaMonkey 2, are already below 4% of our users. Given that SeaMonkey 1.1.x will be supported until April or May 2008 at least (6 months after Gecko 1.9 is released with Firefox 3), there's a good chance that this percentage will decrease enough that not too many people will get hurt by this (esp. as I don't know hoe Mozilla and SeaMonkey users are spread across those OSes, but expect that older OSes have potentially higher usage of the older product).

The trend of SeaMonkey adoption and Mozilla suite being abandoned continues well, but probably slower than some people might expect - for me, at least, it can't go fast enough