The fox rocks!
Although Firefox
3 only hit the servers 10 days ago, it's already had a
staggering run with more than 18
million downloads in the first week alone. As of May this
year, Firefox's market share was getting
close to 20%. With more than 15,000
improvements making version 3 "faster, safer and
smarter than before", this release will undoubtedly hasten the erosion
of Internet Explorer's dominance.But what are those improvements? If, like me, your fox automatically updated itself last week with very little fanfare, you're probably wondering what all the fuss is about. Here's the best reference I've found so far: The Field Guide to Firefox 3 gives a brief, illustrated, straightforward introduction to all those new features.
If you're still unsure, there's reviews here, here and here. And this article details testing that shows Firefox 3 to be the most memory efficient browser in the Windows stable.
At the time of writing, the Firefox 3 Downloads chart showed more than 21 million downloads, with 56,485 going to New Zealand alone. Who's going to make that 56,486 ...?
Updated July 3: "Mozilla has officially made history with a new Guinness world record for the largest number of software downloads in a 24-hour period. The final record breaking 8,002,530 downloads for web browser Firefox 3.0 took place in June..." [more]
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Comments
I celebrated Bill leaving Microsoft by having Microsoft leave my computer yesterday.
Only Ubuntu now.
What a saving on cost of Firewalls, anti-virus and all that.
Posted by: Oldguy | June 30, 2008 6:27 AM
Firefox 3 on Ubuntu 64.
It doesnt crash like FF2 (yay).
When viewing Youtube FF2 used to just close/vanish, like every 2 or 3 clips.
Still no java applets in 64bit FF but thats more Sun's fault than FF3.
Dont like the URL dropdown list in v3 - seems to randomly keep some addresses typed in but not others, and limits itself to a dozen or so.
And the fonts are all weird compared to v2. Whats up with that?
Opera 9.5 is nice though still has the 64bit/java issues :(
Posted by: chris | June 27, 2008 6:40 PM
It is now 59,962 and rapidly increasing.
Posted by: oldguy | June 27, 2008 6:20 PM
I wonder if Firefox has already broken the Guinness records?
All of us at the office use it.
http://www.jobx.co.nz
Posted by: JOBX New Zealand | June 27, 2008 2:47 PM
Rolling on the floor laughing, Adrian. Nice one!!!
Posted by: Geoff | June 27, 2008 2:45 PM
Hey, it's Bill's last day at Microsoft today (Friday). I wonder what the employees will give him?? A Gold Screen of Death?
Posted by: Adrian | June 27, 2008 1:24 PM
Good stuff! Great to see this happen! That is a *heap* of downloads!
Ironically enough, MS are doing a good job of hastening their decline (with their decision that Windows 7 will use Vista (ewwww) as its core). That really is great news for all open-source operating systems, as there is **no way** that even MS can put a few coats of paint on a dung-heap of an OS like Vista and make it "good".
Posted by: Andy | June 26, 2008 10:23 PM