Well, life’s been a bit of a roller-coaster lately. We have been averaging about 2500 Interclue installs per day in the last few months after becoming a Mozilla recommended add-on, which is about 10 times as many as we were getting before that.
On the other hand we also started getting a lot more uninstalls, mostly due to usability flaws that became obvious after we started getting users who really had no idea what they were getting before they installed - the ones who read the first paragraph of the description on addons.mozilla.org and hit “install” because if Mozilla was recommending it, so it had to be worth a go.
Obviously, you can’t please everyone, and it’s pointless to try. But we’ve been working hard to increase the general usability level of Interclue in the past few months, and also to make it fully compatible with Firefox 3 before the official launch, which happened last Tuesday.
As a result of that hard work we’re actually keeping most of our new Firefox 3 users, many of whom are installing Interclue right out of the Firefox 3 add-ons manager, with very little idea of what to expect. It’s impossible to tell how many we’re getting from the add-ons manager vs people visiting addons.mozilla.org - I’m guessing maybe about half?
Currently we’re running at ~ 6k/installs/day, after slowing to “only” 5k/day over the weekend (we always get fewer installs on the weekend). During Download Day we gained almost 13k new users, and peaked at over 1000 installs an hour.
Lots, huh? Not so many when you consider Firefox 3 itself was getting downloaded over 15,000 times per minute at one point during launch day.
The codebase that runs addons.mozilla.org (a.m.o) is called “Remora” - which isn’t entirely a fair analogy - Firefox is certainly a leviathan of a product and we’re benefiting hugely from being attached to it, but there’s a more symbiotic relationship than the one you find with real Remora. I’ll explain what I mean by that in a subsequent post.
