Darren O'Neill
Friend of Playgroup
- Loves: Liverpool FC, Gaming, Films
- Hates: Go karting, People who say "Interweb", Onions
- Inspired by:
- Hong Kong
- Shigeru Miyamoto
- Christopher Lee
- My links:
Mozilla break records with Firefox
Yesterday Mozilla launched the 3rd version of its popular web browser Firefox. To generate interest they announced Download Day 2008, hoping to set a new world record for number of software downloads in 24 hours. At the time of writing Mozilla have just announced that they achieved 8 million downloads in this time and Guinness are now reviewing this world record attempt.
This is great news and hopefully ensures the browser eats further into Internet Explorer’s market share. According to NetApplications, Internet Explorer has fallen from 84% market share to 73.75% since last May; in contrast Firefox has risen from 11% to 18.41%. To show that there is no bitterness Microsoft sent Mozilla a cake.
I am a Firefox user and must say that I am very happy with the improvements in version 3. These start with the visual style: version 2 on the Mac looked like a Windows application, just horrible in comparison to Safari. This has been addressed and the browser now looks like a native Mac application.
As well as the one-click bookmarking system, the one new feature I imagine most people will love (and I’m sure will become ubiquitous in all next generation browsers) is how you locate a previously visited website. We have all been to a website we like, only to forget it’s URL and then been unable to find it again. Other than searching for it via a search engine or trawling through our browser history it was difficult to locate. Now you don’t need to remember the domain of the URL, all you need is the name of the website, or part of the URL. For example, if you want to go back to http://www.bbc.co.uk/football, just type football into the address bar and the BBC site will be suggested for you.
There are a whole host of other nice features available including the ability to tag websites with Mozilla declaring there have been over 15,000 improvements in total. It has been a long time in coming (version 2 arrived in 2006) but it has been worth the wait. Download it now and give it a try.
Posted by Darren on 18 Jun 08, at 8:48 pm
2 comments on this post
As it's so great Jamie - can you change my machine from using Safari to Firefox! Im bored of Safari!
Firefox is easily the best browser, and the new features make it even better - and now it's a proper Mac application as well.
Given what I've heard about IE8, it doesn't sound like Microsoft will be catching it up in terms of functionality anytime soon, just a shame they have such a hold on the market.
On that note - why does Microsoft not force an update to IE7 at least? IE6 seems so primitive given what you can do in Firefox, or even IE7.