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