Firefox Breaks 25 Million Downloads

certron wrote to alert us that earlier this week, Mozilla passed the milestone of 25 million downloads. From the official site: "With a minimal set of tools--an affiliate system, a small donations fundraising system, blogs, galleries, forums, and the good old human larynx--you all are spreading Firefox to a quarter of a million people a day. More than 500,000 sites now link to Firefox according to Google--a fivefold increase from six months ago. What was just a small flame 100 days ago has since exploded into a phenomenal demonstration of the power of open source. Tens of thousands of devoted users and fans are a powerful and capable force of change. We have created a special commemorative image if you would like to mark this milestone on your own site." Reader asa also wrote to mention an interview with Bill Gates from this week where the mogul was asked directly what he thought of Firefox.

Comments

Speed up Firefox

[BobWeiner]

This may have already been mentioned, but here's a link on tweaking Firefox to make it even faster on a broadband connection. I've applied these settings and notice an immediate performance boost.

Re:In other news

[bcmm]

That's fixed in the trunk build, and will be fixed in FF 1.1.

BEFORE applying settings!!!!!

[codesurfer]

I'm sure many people know about this, but please read the following before applying the settings mentioned in the parent article. There are other things to consider. The following is an excerpt

The dearly beloved "run the turbines at Military Power 'til they blow up" Scribner on your staff who suggests sticking their foot through the floorboards by tweaking Firefox & setting "network.http.pipelining.maxrequests" to "30" connections (This means it will make 30 requests at once.)
Said Scribner, who is obviously a gamer & overclocker freak, _FORGOT_ to read the comments section at th4e bottom of the posting http://forevergeek.com/open_source/make_firefox_fa ster.php#comments
"#13 Great little tips, but only one problem, and that's that you're breaking servers by doing this. 3-5 requests is fine, but trying to do 30 requests at once puts some strain on the server. If two people try to access the same page at once with this set, that's 60 connections. Most httpd's are set to cut off after there are 100 connections made. So, 4 people with this set could not access the same site. I urge you to think things through before setting something like this and killing the websites you browse."

Re:BEFORE applying settings!!!!!

[naylor83]

See my above reply. Firefox & Mozilla never do more than 8 requests. Setting a higher value is pointless.

what makes it better are the plugins, my top 5

[Steve_Jobs_HNIC]

here they are:

Adblock
Session Saver
Web Developer
IE View
Target Alert

Re:what makes it better are the plugins, my top 5

[tehshen]

And before the complaints come,

Slashfix

Re:Count me out of the FireFox craze..

[I confirm I'm not a]

I guess if you're dumb enough to fall for the phishing lures, IE is probably an ok idea.

I'm replying to you, partly because I disagree with the "IE is probably an OK idea" (even for dumb people ;) , but mainly because I don't want to draw attention to the troll you're replying to.

The Macworld article is refering to the recent IDN exploit that affects many browsers, but not IE. Macworld presumably considered this newsworthy because the exploit (a) affected Safari, and (b) didn't affect IE. However, IE had already suffered similar exploits, covered here on Slashdot and elsewhere. I had a quick peek on Secunia to see if I could find it, but got sidetracked by the pretty colours on the graphs:
IE
Firefox

Bottom line: IE is still horendously insecure, while Firefox has very few issues, and what few issues it does have are patched quickly.

The sad thing is: I use IE. Apart from the security issues (I don't use it enough to be affected - I use Firefox normally, naturally ;) it's not a bad browser. Trolls like the GP don't help its case. The really sad thing is: one day soon there'll be trolls like this evangelizing (or trying to...) Firefox.

phenomenal demonstration?

[NekoXP]

Phenomenal?

It took them 7 years to get this far.

Don't get me wrong, I use Firefox every day. But let's remember Firefox was not
the primary goal of the Mozilla Project, but a fluke messaround of a couple of
engineers to strip the browser down from an unweildy "suite" to what people want:
an IE replacement.

If Mozilla weren't being so contrary in the very beginning and decided to go the
route diametrically opposite to competing with IE, we'd have been there years ago.

Neko

Re:More = Better?

[sepluv]

this very page (Slashdot) appears totally corrupted

This was fixed in Gecko in May 2004 on the trunk which is used by the latest stable version of Mozilla Suite (but not on the aviary branch).

To fix it in Firefox:

get a recent nightly build--I find them just as stable

get the new minor stable version (1.0.1) which is coming out this month

just install the Slashfix extension.

BTW the bug only occured sometimes if your machine was fast and it was rendering /. too quickly--you could try reloading--it was a genuine bug as it occured intermittently, but the awful slashcode HTML doesn't help (esp. their use of evil many-nested tables for layout--see the funny and informative Why tables for layout is stupid).

Sage cannot reload my RSS feeds

Sage? (BTW, how can you imply that MSIE is better than Firefox in this regard when MSIE doesn't even support RSS feeds.)

I guess I'd somehow like Firefox to "emulate" MSIE when it comes to viewing some "incompatible" sites

It already does to some extent. It is called quirks mode. It uses that mode to render /. as /. is not standard-compliant. Go to page info on the page context menu to see which mode it is using for the page--quirks mode will kick in if a page isn't standards-compliant.

There's always tech evangelism (or filing a tech-evang Bugzilla bug)

Konqueror could pretend to be another browser

So can Firefox. To do it on the fly in Firefox, use the User Agent Switcher.