Firefox 1.0 is a fantastic browser. Great job Mozilla. Firefox puts Interent Explorer to shame, not only from a CSS/XHTML compliance standpoint (I am a professional Web Developer, no... not with Mozilla!), but also as far as it's fundamental usability and it's feature set. The tabbed browsing and built-in RSS linking alone make it worth downloading, and that's only the beginning of the feature list. It is now my primary browser, both when developing and when just surfing. :)
I remember in the early early days of Gecko development how utterly retarded Mozilla was. How plodingly slow development was. I have long been a user of open source, but there simply was no meaty competitor to IE, perhaps short of Opera, but that cost money, so... For years I simply never looked at Mozilla/Gecko and peaceably settled on IE.
But Firefox is a truly worthy competitor -- or supplanter, really -- of IE now. Very few (perhaps < 2%) of websites really don't work with Firefox and I always complain to the site producers to FIX IT. I rarely run IE except when I need to access these sites.
I admire Firefox for being a break-out success and I hope they continue to improve it as it will surely become a bigger and bigger target to hackers. IE's biggest flaws are its seemingly unending vulnerabilities and the less vulnerable Firefox is, the better.
The Penguin is coming after Bill Gates? Since when is the name of an animal capitalized? (My Dog tells me that you don't have to.) And, uhh, the penguin--errr, Penguin--is the Linux mascot. What does that have to do with Mozilla? Oh, that's right--they're both open source projects. I see, it's one side against the other. I forgot, sorry.
Hey all, wanna see the full page ad, go to <a class="jive-link-external" href="http://www.mozilla.org/press/nytimes-firefox-final.pdf" target="_newWindow">http://www.mozilla.org/press/nytimes-firefox-final.pdf</a> . It is a PDF so make sure you have Acrobat installed.
This is another example (if one were needed) of fewer, motivated people, producing the greater more useful product than a much larger number of people can produce elsewhere (IE). A perfect example of the power of the web in action and a great start for sure - I use Firefox myself - but can it capture market share fast enough to overcome the hail and bullets its competitors will inevitably throw at it when they eventually wake up?
[quote]but can it capture market share fast enough to overcome the hail and bullets its competitors will inevitably throw at it when they eventually wake up?[/quote]
1.0PR hit 1M downloads in a week! More than they ever expected. Servers were creeping to a halt. So they boosted their servers to handle the 1.0 release.
1.0 hit 1M download in a day. The first day they were clamoring to get more servers online to handle the load. This number did not include all mirrors nor bit-torrents.
1.0 hit 10M downloads in just over one month!
Windows has never matched those figures in sales of new products ever including the releases of WinMe, Win2k, WinXP or the free release of SP2 for Windows (despite the auto-update feature of Windows, mostly because most people were afraid of what might go wrong).
You want to see comprable download numbers for MS downloads? Watch the next time MS says, "a patch to fix a major critical security flaw in IE which can allow someone to take complete control of your system is now available for download." Oh, wait, you missed it earlier this month.
Not meaning to bash MS --although I did-- but, on its own merit, Firefox is proving that it can gain marketshare fast enough. It keeps gaining usage percent points on the web with a direct correlation to IE's losses. Earlier this week IE was pegged at under 90% and Fx/Mz at over 7%. Safari, Opera and others did not show any significant changes in excess of the margins of error.
The Best of Both Phone, and Tablet
But Firefox is a truly worthy competitor -- or supplanter, really -- of IE now. Very few (perhaps < 2%) of websites really don't work with Firefox and I always complain to the site producers to FIX IT. I rarely run IE except when I need to access these sites.
I admire Firefox for being a break-out success and I hope they continue to improve it as it will surely become a bigger and bigger target to hackers. IE's biggest flaws are its seemingly unending vulnerabilities and the less vulnerable Firefox is, the better.
1.0PR hit 1M downloads in a week! More than they ever expected. Servers were creeping to a halt. So they boosted their servers to handle the 1.0 release.
1.0 hit 1M download in a day. The first day they were clamoring to get more servers online to handle the load. This number did not include all mirrors nor bit-torrents.
1.0 hit 10M downloads in just over one month!
Windows has never matched those figures in sales of new products ever including the releases of WinMe, Win2k, WinXP or the free release of SP2 for Windows (despite the auto-update feature of Windows, mostly because most people were afraid of what might go wrong).
You want to see comprable download numbers for MS downloads? Watch the next time MS says, "a patch to fix a major critical security flaw in IE which can allow someone to take complete control of your system is now available for download." Oh, wait, you missed it earlier this month.
Not meaning to bash MS --although I did-- but, on its own merit, Firefox is proving that it can gain marketshare fast enough. It keeps gaining usage percent points on the web with a direct correlation to IE's losses. Earlier this week IE was pegged at under 90% and Fx/Mz at over 7%. Safari, Opera and others did not show any significant changes in excess of the margins of error.