Posted on 07/26/2005 8:27:57 PM PDT by Mike Bates
As it marked the 75 millionth download of its Firefox Web browser, the Mozilla Foundation said it was expanding in several directions.
The foundation's open-source e-mail reader, Thunderbird, is approaching its 10 millionth download. Mozilla's browser for small devices, Minimo, reached a milestone, as a prerelease version appeared with tabs, a bookmark manager and RSS feeds. The Mozilla staff itself has quadrupled during the past six months, to 40 employees.
"We're beefing up the management on the project," said Chris Hofmann, whose title at Mozilla is in flux since the foundation hired another director of engineering. "The project is still very healthy. We're seeing continued corporate interest and have a lot of large organizations that want to do deployments."
Mozilla on Tuesday marked the 75 millionth download of Firefox. That number has only a hazy relationship to the number of people actually using the browser; it counts multiple downloads of different versions and doesn't count Mozilla's automatic updates or copies from single downloads distributed through organizations by technology managers.
The milestone provides at least a psychological boost to the foundation's volunteers and staffers, who have watched growth rates slip this year amid a string of security problems.
Thunderbird, the foundation's e-mail application, had been downloaded 9,951,582 times as of Tuesday afternoon.
Replacing Hofmann as director of engineering is Mike Schroepfer, who will be responsible for day-to-day management of the engineering staff and determining what features and fixes go into releases. Hofmann's duties will shift to the browser's deployment and distribution, partner relationships, security and community relations.
On the mobile front, Mozilla on Monday released Minimo 0.007, the latest version of the prerelease mobile browser with an interface built in XUL (Extensible User Interface Language).
(Excerpt) Read more at news.com.com ...
Oh, well.
Use the User Agent Switcher extension for Firefox. Most of the time, you can just fake the site to think you're running IE, and everything works fine. Ignorant web developers are most to blame.
Thanks for the suggestion.
firefox certainly is a better mousetrap.
Maxthon does just about everything that Firefox 1.0.6 does, plus it has a couple of tricks up its sleeve: built-in mouse gestures (hold down the right mouse button and move the mouse in certain manners for certain types of navigation) and the powerful AD Hunter feature, which blocks out most ads, popups, popunders, Flash animations and even most errant ActiveX objects!
The reason Firefox has been downloaded 75 million times:
Every time they find a security update you have to download the whole program.
There are actually 100 users who have updated 750,000 times each. I know, I downloaded it again on all 5 of my computers last night. That's 5 more downloads!
The nightlies already have the binary patch system enabled, and it should make it into the next release, so that'll be the end of that.
It also means that if you don't want them, you don't have to have them. I love being able to use extensions to customize the browser, and only add the features I want.
Exactly--which means Maxthon requires you to use a browser that they have defined. Firefox is a bare-bones browser. The user adds the functionality they want--no more and no less.
Yes, but that's essentially most of the "extra" features that are so highly desireable, which saves the hassle of downloading, installing and configuring the extensions like you have to do in Firefox. Is it small wonder why Maxthon won a whole bunch of awards lately and is actually used by Microsoft engineers, according to PC World magazine?
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