Yesterday was the official release of Firefox 3 and there was a large marketing push to get as many people world wide to download it.
For those interested in the 24-hour breakdown per country, the Mozilla team put together an interactive global map that allows you to see how many times FF was downloaded in each country.
With over 7 million downloads in 10 different languages, this map can serve as a rough guide for tech generalizations.
Unsurprisingly regions gripped with central planning and socialism rank at the very bottom. For instance, North Korea has had a grand total of zero downloads (due primarily to the fact that only one internet cafe exists in the entire country, personal computers are verboten and all communication is heavily regulated and censored).
On the other end of the spectrum most of the industrialized world and West are nearly ranked according to their respective GDPs, with America, Germany and Japan taking the top 3 spots.
And while there all sorts of odd numbers to be gleaned (like itty bitty Singapore flying equal with its significantly larger neighbors), the numbers within the Middle East are striking. As of this writing:
Iran: 208,215
Saudi Arabia: 7,412
Kuwait: 1,962
Qatar: 1,265
Iraq: 235
Of course, it could be argued that the numbers are skewed because the same user may be downloading multiple copies, but there doesn’t seem to be much evidence of a nationalistic push to compete in the FF3 Download Olympics (USA! USA!).
Much more could be written about ratios comparing total population with FF3 downloads or total amount of households with internet access with FF3 downloads. However, considering that even Iraq’s smallest peer speaks the same language, I think it is safe to say that the Arabic language is not a limiting factor, nor are time zones.
Rather, it is yet another footnote in the costs of occupation. Who is to blame for destroying the infrastructure and failing to rebuild it to even pre-war levels. (Here are some contemporary numbers from IWS)
Unfortunately, even with all of the neato features in this latest FF version, Iraqis don’t have the wonderful opportunity to worry about automated malware protection when basic services like electricity and running water are still unavailable (you know they actually have had to ration oil-products there too, right?). Maybe the numbers will jump after another few surges.
Legitimate milestone, maybe not. But it is difficult to see how another 5 years of occupation and enhanced interrogation will make the 4.0 release for Iraq any more popular. Maybe additional waterboarding will motivate them.
[Cross-posted to Mises.org]
