Mozilla break records with Firefox

Wednesday 18th June 2008

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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.

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.

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