Manage updates with the Download AppNovember 9, 2005 5:00 PM PST
Firefox marks its first year on the Net
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Since the debut of Firefox 1.0 last November, users have downloaded 106.4 million copies of the open-source Web browser, according to the Mozilla Foundation, which coordinated the development of Firefox.
And within a span of a year, Firefox has grabbed 8.65 percent of the market and put a dent into Internet Explorer's dominance, according to Web site traffic tracking in October by NetApplications.
"At the launch, we had a million downloads on the first day and have not seen any letup in demand," said Chris Beard, head of marketing and product management for Mozilla Corp.
In the past year, Firefox helped validate the concept of an open-source browser and encourage its use through viral word-by-mouth marketing, he added. And as Firefox enters its second year, several changes are in store.
Earlier this month, the test version of Firefox 1.5 Release Candidate 1 came out, featuring elements such as automatic updates and faster performance when hitting the "forward" and "back" buttons.
The final version of Firefox 1.5 may be ready as early as a few weeks from now, depending on the feedback received from the approximately 500,000 users, who are testing the browser, Beard said.
Firefox, meanwhile, plans to kick off next year with an aggressive product cycle, Beard said.
"In 2006, we plan to adopt a more aggressive product cycle," Beard said. "Firefox 2 will launch in the midpoint of next year and Firefox 3 will be out in the first quarter of 2007."
The ramped up product cycle will be driven, in part, by the acceleration Firefox has seen in Web services.
Firefox also plans to begin the New Year with scheduled security and stability updates every six to eight weeks.
"While we'll move to scheduled updates, we will, however, respond to critical issues as needed outside of the scheduled windows," Beard said.
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I use Opera, have for a couple years now. It is the most secure, most functional, and fastest browser on the internet.
FF has had more security patches in it's first year than IE had that year. FF requires plugins to do simple things that not only Opera does natively, but some of them even IE does natively!
I don't understand why the hype, it's not as good as alternatives that have been around YEARS before this came out!
You can tweak IE so that it is very secure, but the default settings leave a lot to be desired.
I've never had a problem with IE and it can browse all web sites wherease FF can't.
Not sure why it's popular. But I am glad that it is giving MS some competition in the browser market. It shows that you can do well if you don't put your money into lawyers and instead put it into the product.
Now Opera is free, who knows... maybe their market share will increase. I still don't think it will jump that much though.
I gave Opera a try because it was free. I must say I'm very impressed with its rendering speed. A very smooth ride. However, I also didn't think Opera was all that good either. I spent a long time configuring it, checking out all the options, a lot of which I don't even know/need.
What's more it rendered a lot of sites oddly to be polite. We all know the coded for IE websites, but Opera makes the mistake of trying to be IE. After all that though, Firefox can render more pages correctly than Opera. That's just one of the reasons why Opera hasn't taken off like Firefox.
I guess you could say, why do so many people love iPod? There's plenty better products out there. It's all about branding.
#2: It's fast (may take longer to load than IE, but once loaded, I find it renders pages must faster -- even friends and neighbors that I've converted to FF comment about its speed). I had been trying to use Mozilla (pre-FF versions) but it just seem to be very S L O W.
#3: It's more secure: I don't have to worry as much about vulnerabilities, spyware, pop-ups. etc. When problems are discovered, they're resolved quickly. Nobody that I've converted to Firefox (and used it consistently) has since experienced the problems that prompted them to call me in the first place (I had one lady who admitted she having trouble giving up her blue-e habit).
#4 It works with 99.9% of the websites I use (including all my banking/finance accounts). I'm not sure why so many people have complaints about websites that don't work in Firefox -- maybe they're hitting the obscure ones - I just don't find it happening to me. For those occasional non-standard sites, I simply right-click and activate my 'View in IE' extension.
I've used Opera, now the ad-free version, it's a good browser but I don't see anything that it has that Firefox can't have. Mouse gestures you can get in FF as well.
Netscape 7.1 was a good browser or at least from what I have tried. FF is just a standalone browser that is what makes it nice, not too chunky. If you want a suite, you'd be better off going with Mozilla 1.7 or whatever the latest version of that is.
IE so many websites are built around, that's a reason some stuff is all native for it.
Since then I have donwloaded Opera 8.x and I use it along side Firefox. They 'cleaned' up the interface and made it a bit simpler. Of course free is always good too. They also support a lot of the W3C recommendation, just like firefox.
My personal opinion these days is you can't go wrong with with Firefox or Opera 8.5. I haven't had any problems with websites in either, except those that rely on activex or those created in frontpage.