Firefox Gets Its Guinness World Record

[kaled]

[news.bbc.co.uk...]

Mozilla has officially made history with a new Guinness world record for the largest number of software downloads in a 24-hour period.

The final record breaking 8,002,530 downloads for web browser Firefox 3.0 took place in June.

Personally, I ditched FF3 as soon as I discovered I could not revert the awful bar to normal function. Nor will I be recommending FF to anyone in the future (unless I discover a download link for FF2).

Kaled.

[edited by: encyclo at 1:06 am (utc) on July 4, 2008]
[edit reason] moved from another location [/edit]

[TinkyWinky]

Means nothing - is that activations? I take it not... bet there was quite a 'few' downloads automated simply to get the world record... what a waste of time.

Sorry to sound boring.

[Receptional Andy]

I could not revert the awful bar

Just change browser.urlbar.maxRichResults to -1 within about:config. Not an 'official' way to do it, but works enough for me.

[Lord Majestic]

Personally, I ditched FF3 as soon as I discovered I could not revert the awful bar to normal function.

Yep, same here - for some reason url bar prediction is totally wrong for me, unacceptable. I will try that browser.urlbar thing though...

[encyclo]

Just to add some balance here ;) I love the new address bar, it was one of the reasons I updated so quickly once the final release came out. It works very well for me as a shortcut to recent pages I've visied as well as a quick search for my bookmarks. (Note: I auto-delete my browsing history every time I close the browser.)

[Murdoch]

Doesn't mean much when there was no previous record holder :)

I honestly haven't downloaded it yet, but from some of the remarks I see here maybe I should wait for the first patch...

[grelmar]

FWIW

The "official tally" is about a half million lower than the original tally, so I'm guessing a lot of duplicates were tossed out. 8 million, to me, is an unsurprising number, as it would represent a small portion of the overall FF user base.

The "awesome bar" really annoyed me the first week or two (I'd been running it in beta form on one of my *nix boxes). But I got used to it, and now have turned around to the point where I love it. It's predictive behaviour is, well, predictable, and it makes it much easier to find sites you visited but forgot to bookmark.

Alas, my days of using FF are growing short. 'Been using it since about version 0.7, but now it's getting too popular. As a result, we'll see the malware guys starting to target it more and more. Firefox's success will be its own demise. Security through obscurity is only effective if you're obscure, and Firefox is more mainstream by the day.

[Elvie]

I LOVE FF3. It is much faster than FF2 and handles having many tabs open better than FF2.
I also like the new address bar.

[Murdoch]

So I went ahead and downloaded it. I don't see what all the fuss is about with the new address bar. Yeah it's a little over the top in terms of size, they probably could do with an option that let's you get rid of either the title tag or URL, or put them next to each other instead of on top of one another, but all in all I don't feel it's any different than the way IE does it (though it DOES seem to be a bit slower in filtering the results).

As a guy who generally uses Safari for Windows (it just looks so PRETTY!) and with the self-populating address bar function it has (which I do like BTW), I can say that this FF thing doesn't bother me in the slightest.

I am a bit perturbed that it automatically makes FF your default browser upon upgrade. That kind of option should NEVER be decided without user permission first. Makes me wonder how much that had to do with this headline:

Firefox 3 Boosts Browsers Market Share to Over 19% [informationweek.com]

Never been much of a fan of companies that force users to learn how to turn off things in their software in order to restore their previous setups...

[dudibob]

I hated the 'awesome bar when I first started using FF3, however now I love it, I have so many bookmarks, I daren't organise them, however the awesome bar searches through them all by just searching for the title of bookmarks.

[Sarkiss]

The full page zoom (Ctrl+) is pretty use useful when watching tiny youtube videos that don't offer full zoom. Mac users have this feature build into the OS, however its missing in Windows and Linux, so being able to do that in FF3, makes it worth updating. The full screen mode (F11) in FF3 is better that in FF2 too since it hides the title bar.

[sgietz]

This is about as exciting and significant as watching the world hot dog eating championship, but without all the throwing up (uh, i mean reversals).

I have FF3 installed and can't complain. The address bar hasn't annoyed me yet.

Just a question that popped into my head: Why do we all love open-source free stuff UNTIL it actually grabs some decent market share? Once the percentage of users are in the double digits we shun it like a product from an evil, evil corporation and say things like "It's gotten too big for its own good." It appears that we can't stand when a free piece of software hits the mainstream market. I bet if Linux hit a 10% user base, many people would kick it to the curb.

Or perhaps we don't like the added features with each iteration of the software, which are actually necessary to appeal to the mass market. That's something to ponder.

Underground software has to remain underground, or the very people who fought for it to be mainstream, will curse it to the grave.

[Mathieu Bonnet]

Am I the only one to think this would be a good chance to estimate the number of active Internet users, by comparing the current number of downloads, with the usage share on some representative websites, on the same day? (I mean, the number of Internet users, which connected to the Internet, since the release of Firefox 3... that is, the number of users you can expect to connect to the Internet, in a matter of two weeks and a half... -of course, it depends on the period of the year, but it is still interesting).

[downloadcounter.sj.mozilla.com...] shows about 29,400,000 downloads... Let's take the 4% figure, quoted in the above linked site... it means there would be about 735,000,000 active Internet users. If we take, like, 1,200,000,000 total Internet users (1,018,057,389 in 2005, from the CIA Factbook), it means there would be about 61% of active Internet users, among all the Internet users.

If we take the number of 6,678,000,000 people on Earth (july 2008 estimate, again, from the CIA Factbook), it means there are, on Earth, about 11% of active Internet users.

(I hope I didn't make any mistake, now...).

[edited by: Mathieu_Bonnet at 3:02 pm (utc) on July 3, 2008]

[jimh009]

I like the new "awful bar" too. It works flawlessly for me, although I do tend to visit the same sites over and over again. Other than the dinky home/refresh buttons, I have no complaints at all about FF3.

[aksival]

I wasn't too pleased with Firefox 3 as it arrived out of the box. In fact, I downloaded it at home and work but reserved the install on my home computer until many of my favorite add-ons were updated. I could really care less about the 'awesome bar', it doesn't do much for me either way, but I'm used to seeing it now, so I've stopped complaining about it.

The new default theme lacks something, though...perhaps that good ol' fashioned Firefox look. FF3 became a lot more aesthetically pleasing after I installed the Phoenity Aura theme. One of my favorite built-in features now is CTRL+SHIFT+T, which allowed me to ditch Tab Mix Plus altogether. And yes, Gmail and a handful of other web apps run noticeably faster now.

I understand that a lot of this version was code cleanup and optimization, but from the looks of it, this is really nothing more than Firefox 2.5 at best.

[alphabetize]

I went back to version 2 after I found a few plugins that did not work. e.g. Firebug

unless I discover a download link for FF2

Firefox 2 is here
[mozilla.com...]

[MatthewHSE]

I went back to version 2 after I found a few plugins that did not work. e.g. Firebug

Disabling extension compatibility checking can take care of a lot of this stuff. Just go to

about:config

and right-click to create a new Boolean entry. Name it

extensions.checkCompatibility

and set it to false.

This will allow you to install any extension. Most will work, but some that are badly out of date may not work completely or at all. Some may even crash the browser, in which case you'll have to edit some text files and delete some directories in your profile to salvage it. But that can be done inside of two minutes if you know what you're looking for.

[appi2]

I HATE the address/url bar in FF3.

I used to be able to just click on the drop down and open the last url I typed in. Usually the one I'm working on. Now it shows some bizarre stupid arrrgh god I hate it, hate it hate it.

Not very developer friendly.

[razoras]

I LOVE the new bar. I don't even have to remember the URL, but if I've visited a site recently and I know words that might have been in it or in the title I can almost always find it.

[Fortune Hunter]

Firefox 3 Boosts Browsers Market Share to Over 19%

Bad news for Microsoft's attempt to rule the Internet with an iron fist. That is the downside to being on top, the only direction to go is down.