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Mozilla 1.8b1 Released, Firefox Growth Slowing

Posted by Zonk on from the get-out-there-and-download-people dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Mozilla 1.8 Beta 1 has been released, and in addition to numerous bug fixes now includes ECMAScript for XML (E4X). Mozilla 1.8 will serve as the code basis for Firefox 1.1. In other Mozilla related news, WebSideStory saw Firefox's usage growth slow down to just 15% (Jan-Feb) from 22% (Dec-Jan) making Firefox's 10% marketshare goal for 2005 potentially more challenging. Their stats also saw Internet Explorer usage drop below 90% for the first time in many years."

6 of 425 comments (clear)

  1. It's a 1.8 improvement by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    They are faster. Firefox 1.1 should have the same changes.

  2. Not quite accurate by MrWa · · Score: 5, Informative

    The summary is not quite accurate regarding Firefox 1.1 being based on Mozilla 1.8; my understanding of the roadmap is that Gecko 1.8 - which is used in Mozilla - will form the base of the Firefox 1.1 program. Maybe just a technicality but it is different to say the base on which the programs will built is the same, rather than Firefox will be a stripped down version of Mozilla.

  3. Interesting theory, but wrong in this case by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    It has nothing to do with bloat or the number of people working on the project. Instead the speed difference has everything to do with Mozilla (specifically Gecko, the rendering engine) getting much faster between Mozilla 1.7 (off which Firefox is based) and Mozilla 1.8.

  4. Here by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    IE Theme.

  5. Re:Firefox isn't made by Microsoft. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    It could be this: the popup blocker doesn't block popups launched from Flash (it's technically a hard thing to do, as Flash is essentially an embedded application running within Firefox and can do whatever it wants).

    Sometime in the last couple of weeks, Fastclick, a major ad network, started exploiting this to get its popups around Firefox's popup blocker. The ad scripts load a small Flash movie which then lauches the popup.

    You can block plugins from launching popups by using a hidden pref but this will block all plugin-launched popups, even ones launched in response to a mouse click. To do this, enter about:config in the Location bar, hit return and then right-click any where in the content area and choose New > Integer. Enter privacy.popups.disable_from_plugins as the name and 2 as the value.

  6. Re:Firefox isn't made by Microsoft. by starwed · · Score: 5, Informative

    Flashblock is a good extension to get rid of this problem; as long as you don't mind clicking on those flash driven plugins you actually want.