It’s official, Firefox has entered the Guinness World Record for being downloaded over 8 million times in one day. That easily smashed their goal over 5 million downloads. No doubt that this shows the dedication and loyalty that Firefox users have for the software.
Source: Mozilla Blog via ReadWriteWeb
Firefox 3.0 was released early last week. So far it’s been a heck of a lot faster for me, though to be fair I’ve only given it about two hours of full usage and several of my extensions (my most important ones at that!) have yet to be updated.
Not to turn this into a Firefox vs Opera debate, but that is one of the many reason I always loved Opera more than Firefox… Opera “just worked”. I didn’t need to update or find new extensions for the key features that i used. Thsoe being the ability to move the tab bar (I like mine on the bottom) and mouse gestures. I’m disabled without my browser set up like I’m use to. Bah!
There has been some rumble the last few days about a new service called Plurk. I first noticed it when ping.fm did an update earlier this week and added support for it.
Plurk, like Twitter, is a micro-blog / status service. However rather than display things in a list view, Plurk uses a rather nice timeline view. This fresh approach, in addition to Twitters consistent stability issues has lead people to ask, could Plurk be a twitter killer?
My answer: Sure, it could be. But it still has a long way to go, and will need to offer several additional features. But so far, I’ve really liked it.
Of course, Plurk isn’t the fist service to be considered a “twitter killer”. Pownce and Jaiku as well as other services have all shared the same title. So far, nothing has really been able to touch the king of micro-blogging.
Part of what makes Twitter so unbeatable right now is the number of applications, plugins, and extensions that allow you to user Twitter. You’ll find something twitter related for Firefox, Flock, Google Desktop, iGoogle, Facebook, you can even find widgets that allow you to display your tweets on your personal blog. Not to mention the dozens of other sites out there that will aggregate your twitter data and display it.
What service does everyone else use? I’ve got friends on them all. So far my favorite is Plurk, followed by Ponce and Jaiku, with Twitter dead last.
Another beta was released for the upcoming Firefox 3. The new beta 5 is said to be faster and more in tune with the operating system it is installed to (Windows, Linux, Mac). So far it’s looking pretty nice.
Firefox 2.0.0.12 is now available for multiple platforms. This is a security and stability update and it’s recomended that all users update to the latest version.
I posted yesterday about a new ad for Firefox that just sucked. It’s not that I found it offensive (many people did!), but I simply thought it was boring, not funny, and well… just stupid. While the ad is still available via YouTube (I’m not linking to it again) it has been removed from Mozilla’s “viral” website, and Mozilla’s VP of marketing Paul Kim has pubicaly apologized stating that,
“There is no way we would have gone live with a site that mocks cancer victims if there had been a review of these stats beforehand. Something went seriously wrong with our content development process, and I’m working to clean this up now. The site is up now for testing purposes, but should have been kept behind password authentication until we were ready to open it up. Regardless of these issues on our end, the main thing is to say that I take responsibility for the situation, and again, apologize to anyone who was upset by this.”
Apparently Mozilla thought they would be cool and release something that kind of resembles a viral ad. Unfortunately, the ad more than sucks… it’s probably the worst piece of garbage that I’ve ever seen on YouTube. I think I’ll go so far as to say that this ad makes me want to stop using Firefox all together.
Come on Mozilla stick to what you do best, make software. Leave the advertising to people that know how to do that. Read more about the bad ad at TechCrunch.
Not that anyone really cares at this point, but AOL has killed Netscape for the 2nd time. For the less than 0.2% out there that actually use Netscape, AOL will only provide security updates for the next month. On February 1, 2008 the browser will no longer be supported.
They are encouraging users to switch to the Firefox web browser.
Mozilla has published a new beta version for the upcoming Firefox 3 browser. Check out the release notes for information on what has changed. According to the notes, beta 2 has over 900 improvements over beta 1.
You can download the new beta here.
It’s only been a couple of days since Firefox 2.0.0.10 was released and now we have another update. Apparently this one fixes something that was broke in x.10. Must have been pretty bad considering how quickly this one was rushed out.
