The largest bank in the United States has officially ignored the second most popular Web browser--until recently.
A tipster for Networkworld.com pointed out recently that Bank of America's Web site did not list the Mozilla Foundation's Firefox as a "supported browser," even though Firefox now commands almost 20 percent of the browser market. The bank's site lists Microsoft's Internet Explorer, Apple's Safari, and Netscape as acceptable browsers.
Netscape? Even AOL, Netscape's former owner, doesn't support Netscape Navigator anymore.
Of course, Firefox, which was released in 2004 and recently set a Guiness record for downloads in a 24-hour period, still works on the BofA Web site--just not officially. The issue apparently came up when a BofA customer contacted the bank about problems he was having accessing the site using Safari. "Please don't tell me to just use Firefox instead," the Networkworld.com reader told BofA customer support.
Not a problem, according to customer support.
"Please note Bank of America does not support Firefox," was customer service's reply.
When posed with the question of why the No.1 bank's Web site did not whole-heartedly embrace the No. 2 browser's 180 million users, a spokeswoman told Networkworld.com that "there is a process that we go through to 'officially support' a browser type and version, which includes in-depth functional and regression testing cycles.
"As the usage of Firefox browsers has increased with our customer base, we will be initiating a full support model for Firefox version 2.x in the very near future," spokeswoman Tara Burke told Networkworld.com.
Think "the very near future" will prove to be very soon? Don't bank on it.
Which is the world's fastest browser? According to Zimbra, Safari runs fastest, though it didn't beat out Firefox by much. Both Safari and Firefox were roughly twice as fast as Microsoft's Internet Explorer 7.
Of course, Zimbra was testing for how these browsers perform with the Zimbra Web application. Your mileage may vary with other applications. In fact, I'd love to see a wide range of tests for different sites and applications. Who's next?
As an aside, I continue to be impressed at how Zimbra treats non-Microsoft platforms as first-class citizens (along with Microsoft). Firefox is the same way. Both allow you to run on the Mac, for example, without losing any functionality that you'd find in Windows/IE.
It's called great code. Weak developers write code that limps on anything but Windows. Great developers write code that ports well to diverse platforms.
The Delicious plug-in makes it easier to add descriptive tags to bookmarks stored at the Delicious site.
(Credit: Yahoo)Investors and industry watchers may have their eyes on Yahoo's executive departures and coming reorganization, but for most people involved with Yahoo are just users of the company's technology.
Which is why it's interesting that Yahoo released a version of its Delicious plug-in for Internet Explorer on Thursday. (Download Delicious Internet Explorer extension 1.0 for Windows.)
The plug-in, which Yahoo released in beta form in May, makes it easier for people to use the Delicious "social bookmarking" site. Delicious lets people store Web page bookmarks on a central server, label them with a description and tags, and share them with others.
Delicious got its plug-in start with the open-source Firefox browser, but the site can be used by anyone with a browser without plug-ins. The Yahoo plug-in works with IE 6, IE 7 and should work with the IE 8 beta, but Yahoo isn't making any promises.
Take this statistic with a grain of salt, but Mozilla said more than 8 million copies of Firefox 3 were downloaded in its first 24 hours online.
Mozilla, which is behind the open-source Web browser, was trying to set a download record for the software. The 24-hour period lasted from 11:16 a.m. PDT Tuesday to the same time Wednesday, and Mozilla said it's waiting for the Guinness Book of World Records to review the results.
Mozilla showed more than 8 million copies of Firefox 3 were downloaded in its first 24 hours online.
(Credit: Mozilla)The download rate, which peaked at 14,000 per minute Tuesday, was still going strong at more than 6,000 per minute Wednesday morning.
Next question: will it make a difference?
Mozilla fanned the fanboy flames with its download record attempt, but it's likely the majority of those who downloaded Firefox 3 at this stage will just use it to replace Firefox 2, not a competitor such as Microsoft's still-dominant Internet Explorer or Apple's third-place Safari.
There's also a big difference between downloading Firefox, installing it, using it, and switching to it as the primary browser. One early sign shows at a minimum, though, that Firefox 3 usage is significant at more than 4 percent share, according to Net Applications.
And don't forget the error bars: it's impossible to say how many of the Firefox 3 copies were installed by enthusiasts trying to goose the number.
And while 8.3 million might well become an audited record, Adobe blogger and evangelist Ryan Stewart pointed out that Adobe gets 8 million installations of the Flash plug-in on an average day.
Don't let my note of skepticism detract from the occasion, though. This might have been just a PR stunt, but the fact that Mozilla's Download Day drew as much attention as it did indicates that Firefox is more than just a piece of software. It's a movement people want to belong to.
For full coverage, including reviews and videos, see CNET's Firefox 3 resource center.
Firefox 3 gained market share rapidly, even before it was 24 hours old.
(Credit: Net Applications)Firefox 3 is spreading fast, claiming more than 4 percent of the share of Web browser usage less than 24 hours after its release.
According to Net Applications, which monitors browser usage at major Web sites, Firefox 3 rapidly ascended to what I'd call force-to-be-reckoned-with status, something Web designers shouldn't be ignoring. For comparison, Apple's Safari had 6.25 percent share in May, and Opera had 0.71 percent.
Undoubtedly, most Firefox 3 activity is from existing Firefox users, but it's still a notable achievement, given that software companies constantly struggle to get users to adopt the latest products.
Mozilla, which sponsors and oversees development of the open-source Web browser, released Firefox 3 for download on Tuesday. It primed the publicity pump with an effort to set a 24-hour download record, and interest by the abundant Firefox loyalists brought Mozilla's servers to their knees for nearly two hours Wednesday.
Mozilla has been fulfilling pent-up demand ever since. Sometime after 7 a.m. PDT, downloads crossed the 7 million mark, according to Mozilla's download counter, which is fun to watch, even though it's badly formatted.
The download rate, which peaked at 14,000 per minute Tuesday, was about 6,600 per minute Wednesday morning.
For full coverage, including reviews and videos, see CNET's Firefox 3 resource center.
Update 12:23 p.m. PDT: The official Firefox 3 download site is live; the record-setting attempt began at 11:16 a.m. PDT. Update 10:53 a.m PDT: See this separate blog post on the Mozilla download site troubles. Update 10:02 a.m. PDT: Mozilla is having some technical issues with the site but expects the download to be available shortly. Update 6:43 a.m. PDT: I added the scheduled launch time, 10 a.m. PDT.
Mozilla plans to release Firefox 3 on Tuesday, and the open-source project is opening a new front in the browser wars.
As the Web transforms from a static repository of content into a foundation for applications such as word processors and graphics editors, browsers are growing up from mere gateways into the tool that makes those applications possible. In this new era, it's Firefox--the heir to the Netscape legacy--that's going up against the victor of the last era, Internet Explorer.
"It gives you the horsepower you need to experience rich Internet apps as they should be from a performance standpoint," said Damon Sicore, Mozilla's director of platform engineering, mentioning Gmail and Google Maps specifically as applications where users don't want to wait. "As these apps get bigger and more complicated, faster browsers are going to become more critical."
The Firefox 3 'awesome bar' can give faster access to Web addresses.
Specifically, it takes 60 milliseconds to change Gmail from showing one message to another with Firefox 3, Sicore said, compared with 413 milliseconds for IE 7 and 227 for Firefox 2.
Microsoft is toiling away on IE8, though, with a first beta released and a second scheduled to emerge in August. The program has been reworked to improve performance, said Dean Hachamovitch, Microsoft's general manager in charge of IE. With no prompting, he mentioned Gmail as one area where the company has received favorable feedback, and he clearly welcomes the competition.
"IE is the browser of choice for more people on the Web than anything else," Hachamovitch said. "There's an all-around quality, whether in ease of use, reliability, the security we stand by, that makes it a better choice."
Vying for share
Mozilla is a force to be reckoned with, with 18 percent market share to 74 for IE, according to Net Applications statistics. That's enough to ensure that major Web sites have to support Firefox.
Apple's Safari--now available for Windows, too, is in third place with 6 percent share. The next contender, Opera, has less than 1 percent, but it's scrappy: "The browser is the single most important piece of software made today, so innovation is incredibly important if you want to extend the reach of the Web," the company said in a statement.
Firefox is the second-ranked browser in market share for May 2008.
(Credit: Net Applications)Microsoft knows the stakes are high, with a richer Web coming into being. "It is a particularly fertile period. A bunch of pieces started lining up magically in the last couple years to get some innovation going here," Hachamovitch said
Firefox isn't shying away from competition either. To try to heighten its profile, Mozilla hopes to set a 24-hour download record with Firefox 3, which has been code-named Gran Paradiso. The download period is scheduled to begin at 10 a.m. PDT.
Perhaps a more fruitful alternative to whipping fans into a lather through, though, would be to court business users.
"Mozilla needs to show corporations some love," said Forrester analyst Thomas Mendel in a recent report. "Large-scale, companywide deployments are not yet typical. Mozilla continues to expend little energy on wooing IT managers to formally adopt Firefox," for example by offering paid support services, he said.
Firefox 3 features
Faster performance is one Firefox 3 improvement Sicore points to. Two others are better memory handling and what's known as the "awesome bar."
To test memory use, Firefox programmers load 500 pages from top sites on the Web then closes and opens them thousands of times. Through that process, Mozilla stamped out many memory "leaks" under which Firefox 2 wouldn't relinquish memory once it was no longer needed, Sicore said. The company also reduced the amount of memory the browser requires overall.
But memory is hidden under the covers. Front and center is awesome bar, officially called the Smart Location Bar, which lets users type real words rather than sometimes abstruse URL addresses to call up Web sites.
For example, typing "maps" into the bar on my computer retrieves a list of some recent stories I've written involving maps as well as recent maps I've requested off the Internet. That's handy for retrieving recently visited Web sites quickly. Another example of how the feature worked well: I was trying to relocate a Web site I used to monitor Amazon.com's Web site performance, and typing "Amazon" into the bar showed the site--GrabPerf--as one of the options.
Mozilla uses its own formula to determine what results pop up in the list, weighting by factors such as how recently and how frequently you visited various sites. Typing "n" gets me to News.com in no time flat, but your own results will vary according to your browsing habits.
Firefox 3 has been steadily climbing in usage through its testing period.
(Credit: Net Applications)The awesome bar has its detractors who'd like the feature to be optional. (Tweakers can disable the awesome bar by editing their Firefox configuration.)
Among other features in Firefox 3:
• A prominent warning when a user tries to open a page that has been shown to host malware such as viruses or spyware or that's involved in phishing--the attempt to fool people into entering personal information into a counterfeit Web site.
• Offline data access, a feature that can make Web applications usable even when the network is unavailable. That's a potential boon for Web apps, but future versions of IE 8 and Safari also support the technology.
Web-based protocol handlers, which lets the browser launch a Web application rather than a PC program for certain actions such as a Web site "mailto" link that otherwise would create an e-mail in software such as Outlook.
• The Cairo graphics engine that lays the foundation for better direct integration with a computer's video hardware. "Video inside the browser is coming," Sicore said.
• animated PNG (Portable Network Graphics), another nail in the coffin of the GIF (Graphics Interchange Format) image type.
• A better full-page zoom feature that devotes maximum screen real estate to the browser. Moving the mouse pointer over a thin strip across the top of the screen temporarily pulls down the browser controls.
• A star button to quickly add bookmarks; double-clicking opens a dialog box that lets users describe bookmarks with tags.
• Support for Windows Vista's parental controls.
• And better support for Mac OS X. For example, it has a Mac-native appearance and has been re-plumbed internally to use Apple's Cocoa technology, a necessary step on the road toward 64-bit support.
Plug-in problems
One of Firefox's claims to fame is the wide collection of add-ons that are available. It's been a bumpy ride coaxing coders to support the new browser, though.
Some major add-ons now have arrived, including Yahoo's Delicious and the Firebug tool for Web site developers.
However, not everybody made the leap. One is Google Browser Sync, which synchronizes bookmarks, passwords, and other settings across multiple installations of Firefox 2. "Phasing out Google Browser Sync was a tough call, but we have decided to focus our efforts on other products, like Toolbar and Gears, that also extend the capability of multiple browsers," Google said of the Labs project in a statement. Happily, there are other alternatives--I like Foxmarks.
Of the top add-ons, "the majority have upgraded 3.0," Sicore said. The laggards will have a grace period "on the order of months" before Firefox 2.0 versions will automatically suggest installing the upgrade.
Upate 9:40 a.m. PT--I clarified the partnership terms for companies that want to bundle the toolbar.
Yahoo announced a partnership with Acresso Software, which develops the InstallShield software installer product, that the companies say will make it easier to spread the Yahoo Toolbar.
The Yahoo Toolbar augments browser possibilities.
(Credit: Yahoo)Through the deal, it will be easier for the 71,000 software organizations using InstallShield to bundle the toolbar into the installation process, the companies said Thursday. Of course, software companies still must want to bundle the toolbar, but the Acresso option makes that easier to do if they so choose.
The Yahoo Toolbar adds abilities such as pop-up ad blocking, Yahoo Mail notification, bookmark centralization, and some spyware protection to Internet Explorer and Firefox, the two most widely used Web browsers.
Perhaps more important in Yahoo's effort to remain competitive with Google, the free download also features a search box.
Firefox is set to top 20 percent global market share in July, continuing its steady trend toward world domination through, er, open-source liberation.
Unlike Microsoft's Internet Explorer, which relied on all sorts of tricks and tying to achieve its dominant status, Firefox's gains seem to be coming for two reasons:
- It works better (Better security, better performance, better functionality).
- It's much more customizable.
As ReadWriteWeb points out, the game is increasingly Firefox's to lose. Internet Explorer used to command 96 percent of the market. Now it's struggling to hold onto 80 percent, with Firefox chipping away, 1 percent at a time.
Better software doesn't always win. In today's market, in fact, the superior marketing budget generally wins.
But not in the IE versus Firefox war, for some reason. Firefox continues to gain market share. Perhaps this time "better" really will translate into market share.
SAN FRANCISCO--Google showed off working prototypes Wednesday of new possibilities for its Gears project to goose Web browsers' abilities.
When Google launched Gears a year ago, the company overemphasized one important feature, its ability to make Web applications work even when the browser is disconnected from the Internet, Chris Prince, a lead Gears engineer, said in a talk at the Google I/O conference here Wednesday. The new features, though, head in dramatically different directions: notifications on the desktop of various events, support for location information, better interactions with a computer's file system, and technology to let large file uploads proceed even when hampered by intermittent network connectivity.
Chris Prince, a Google engineer, describes new possibilities for Google's Gears software to improve Web browsers.
(Credit: Stephen Shankland/CNET News.com)At the same time Google is working on the open-source Gears project, competitor Yahoo has begun similar efforts, announcing its BrowserPlus effort this week. The moves show that the Internet giants are trying to steer the basic fabric of the Internet into more lively directions.
"I think people have realized the browser is kind of broken," Prince said in an interview after his talk. "A lot of us are trying to improve it."
The project initially was called Google Gears, but the search giant removed its name Wednesday in an effort to show it's not just the company's work. MySpace announced it's using Gears for its mail system at the show.
Prince wouldn't commit to any of the new features ever making their way into Gears, but it's clear the company has grand ambitions for what can be done with web applications. "We want to make it so Web applications can be just as powerful as desktop applications by unlocking the capability of the local machine," Prince said.
He demonstrated five Gears prototypes:
• One let a Web page create a shortcut icon on a computer's desktop so people could launch that Web application with a double-click instead of a more laborious process.
• A notification process, which like Yahoo's BrowserPlus feature ties into a computer's general system notification abilities, is a major missing piece in letting Web applications seize a user's attention the way desktop apps can. "Web apps have this problem where they can't tell users about important things happening on their system," Prince said.
• His file system demonstration showed a dialog box that let him select a large group of photos for upload rather than the one-file-at-a-time process that today afflicts Web site operations.
• A "blob"-processing ability could be used, for example, to divide a large file into bite-sized pieces, an approach that makes it easier to restore an upload interrupted by a bad network connection.
• He used a geolocation-processing ability to process latitude-longitude information to provide a more useful Google map showing bars near Moscone Center in San Francisco.
Gears still needs to handle privacy, though, when it comes to sharing location information with Web sites, he added. "There has to be permission for using location data. We haven't figured out the best model yet," Prince said.
And though he didn't demonstrate anything, Prince also said there's work under way to try to build Webcam and microphone support into Gears.
A year ago it was Google with its Gears project. Now Yahoo wants to make your browser better, too.
Yahoo BrowserPlus makes it possible to tag, crop, and perform other sophisticated operations for a Flickr photo-uploading Web site.
(Credit: Yahoo)A year after the Google launched its Gears project, Yahoo announced software called BrowserPlus that has a similar philosophy: expand what's possible to make Web applications a better alternative to programs running natively on a personal computer. Right now, it's available only in a "sneak peek" on some Yahoo-operated Web sites.
"BrowserPlus is a technology designed to 'extend the Web,' so that developers can build more exciting Web applications and so end users can get more done inside their Web browsers," Yahoo said on a BrowserPlus frequently-asked-questions page.
Among its abilities: "Different Web sites can use BrowserPlus to support things like drag and drop from the desktop, easier file uploads, more efficient and secure acquisition of feeds and information, and native desktop notifications," Yahoo said.
This sounds good to me, at least in principle. I've been trying Google's and Facebook's Web-based instant-messaging applications, but without desktop notifications, they're only as immediate and useful as any old Web mail software.
Yahoo's BrowserPlus project aims to make Web browsers more powerful.
(Credit: Yahoo)The software, along with Gears, shows an interesting trend in Web design: the biggest players are working to expand what can be done with the Internet. It's reminiscent of the early days of the Web, when Netscape and Internet Explorer would implement new features to permit more elaborate Web sites.
Google appears to be trying to make it easier for competitors to embrace Gears. At its Google I/O conference here Wednesday, Google de-branded Gears today, taking its name off the project and announcing some new Web browser support in the works.
BrowserPlus works on Mac OS X 10.4 and 10.5 machines and on Windows XP and Vista machines. Supported browsers are Internet Explorer 7 or later, Apple Safari 3 or later, and Firefox 2 or later, Yahoo said.
Those who want to try it out can visit Yahoo's BrowserPlus demo site. That site offers an in-page Flickr photo uploader that lets users drag, tag, rotate, and crop photos, an IRC IM client; and for the programmer types, a JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) inspector.
