Eclipse IDE for Java Developers Feels Lucky

Up to now more than 12 million Luna packages have been downloaded. That is more than two petabytes and on average, 63 packages per second. On 26th September the first service release was published and a few days later the packages were rearranged on the download page. This dramatically influenced which download package is chosen.

Eclipse Standard 4.4 (which was called Eclipse Classic before Kepler) was renamed into Eclipse IDE for Eclipse Committers 4.4.1. Regardless of the name, the package is not only for Eclipse committers, but also for Eclipse contributors and for Eclipse- or OSGi-based development. On the download site the packages are ordered by download numbers. The package lost its pole position and dropped to fifth place after a few days. Then the Eclipse IDE for Java Developers was put on the top, above the ordered by downloads list. The download numbers of the pure Java IDE increased from 10% to 31%. In contrast, the download percentage of the Standard/Committers package dropped from about 38% to below 4%. It seems that a third of the downloaders select the first package regardless of what it is.

In Google Search I have never used the I’m Feeling Lucky button which redirects directly to the first search result. But I am pretty sure that many do. If one third of the users always choose the first item of a list, how many will spend some time to change the default settings? Maybe we should reconsider some of the default preferences of the Eclipse IDE. I think it was a good decision to enable the line numbers in text editors by default in Luna. I would appreciate if in the Java editor the automatic correction of semicolons and brackets position would be enabled, too. Also I would like to have Remember last used page in the search dialog enabled by default. Which default preferences would you like to change for the ones that feel lucky?