Firefox 3 huge in Iran?
As you may have heard, Firefox is trying to set the record for most downloads in a single day for the launch of Firefox3, and it looks like they may actually get it (at 6MM and counting), though there are no real stats on the current record. They started the day in a very US centric time zone and at spread firefox there is an interactive map that shows you where the downloads are coming from.
I was playing around with it and saw that Iran has 179k downloads so far, which seems very high. It compares with the UK and France at 210k each and is way ahead of China (133k), India (58k), Russia (81k), Brazil (135k) and Australia (115k). Does anyone know why? How did Firefox get so popular in Iran? Is it because of extensions like FoxyProxy or AccessFlickr to get around the government censorship?
If anyone knows why, please let me know and also go answer my brother’s question on why there is a sudden surge in Twitter followers from Iran.
Keywords: firefox
June 19th, 2008 at 10:49 am
many reasons, but the most important ones:
- huge number of young iranian bloggers. most of them use open-source applications like firefox, linux,… .
- the anti-iranian propaganda in west that makes hard for iranian to purchase and use softwares.
- strong iranian web2 communities like balatarin.com (the persian version of digg.com) that keep iranian youths informed of news and events.
June 19th, 2008 at 11:40 pm
فایرفاکس ۳ در ایران
حتما همتون در جریان نسخههای دریافت شده از فایرفاکس ۳ هستید، بیشتر از اون چیزی که ما تعجب کردیم، جهانیان متعحب شدند!
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September 19th, 2008 at 2:16 am
Thanks for the link to balatarin, it’ll make me practice reading farsi. Makes sense with the trade sanctions but i never had any trouble finding any software in Iran