Posted on 02/24/2008 7:21:51 PM PST by CedarDave
Firefox, the open source web browser from Mozilla, is continuing to grow at a phenomenal rate, and has now passed the 500 million download mark since its launch in November 2004. Mozilla is bizarrely celebrating by urging us all to donate some free rice.
The Firefox browser made its debut in November 2004, and quickly established itself as a viable alternative to market leader, Internet Explorer from Microsoft. By February 2005, 25 million people had already downloaded the browser, and were talking up its speed and efficiency.
The browser passed the 400 million download mark last September, and has managed another 100 million in the five months since.
The Mozilla Blog were the first to break the news of the achievement (closely followed by CNET News), and then proceeded to talk statistics about what 500 million would mean if calculated in other ways.
“For some perspective, that’s roughly the audience size of 10,000 Rome Colosseums combined. It would be the weight, in kilograms, of 8,500 Boeing 747 airplanes. In dollars, for $500 million you and 15 of your friends can fly to the International Space Station.”
And then bizarrely, but laudably, they urged us all to try and feed the third world by inviting friends to play the word game on FreeRice.com and try to donate 500,000,000 grains of rice in one day, which would be enough to feed 25,000 people.
Even with this level of success, Firefox is still a long way behind Microsoft Internet Explorer as web browser of choice. While IE has a market share of about 75%, Firefox can only manage 17%. Safari is in third with a paltry 6%. Now that’s perspective for you.
I’m a big fan and user of Firefox, and wish more people would see the advantages of speed, security and usability it has over its big name rival.
Hopefully Firefox 3, currently being worked on and in beta testing will help Mozilla to cut the gap with Microsoft even more than they’ve already managed in a mere three years.
(p.s. -- personal bias, Firefox with some extensions makes using HTML in Free Republic much easier and faster)
Computer tech PING!
I made the switch a few months ago. Explorer who?
My favorite extensions:
BBCodeXtra *
DictionarySearch
NoScript
PDF Download
Tab Counter
Tab X
Undue Closed Tabs Button
* HTML and BB codes - used extensively with Free Republic postings and replies.
Which extensions, if you don’t mind my asking? I think I remember a post of yours on an ancient FF thread from 2005 or so and you had some add-on where it does tags for you, in the actual body of an FR reply box?
Oops, I see you answered my question. thanks.
Do you not like Tab Mix Plus? I didn’t like it so I uninstalled it, but then I reinstalled it because I missed the “protect tab” feature. Someone should just make a “protect tab” add-on, without all the other junk, IMO.
It certainly is! It shows how much Firefox has gained and IE has lost over the past few years. Slow progress, maybe, but still . . .
BBCodeXtra is the simplest and easiest to use. A more complete but not as fast, IMO, is Xinha Here! which is a complete HTML editor.
BBCodeXtra is excellent. I’m testing it out now. Thanks for the recommendation. It beats that other extension I had installed for stuff like this (I forget the name of it). Maybe it was Xinha Here, can’t remember.
I had “Tab Mix Plus” installed for a while too, but not for a year or more. I’m not sure, without checking, what “protect tab” does, but if it allow for you to retrieve an accidentally closed tab, then “Undue Closed Tabs Button” does the same thing.
Thanks. I guess I need undue closed tabs and I should be all set.
BBCodeXtra has settings for bbcode, html and xhtml menus. Disable those you don’t use.
Dave, do you, or anyone reading this, have a solution to my one and only beef with Firefox?
When I refresh an FR thread, Firefox takes me to the bottom of the thread, while on IE, it keeps me at the place I was at when I refreshed (which I prefer). Am I doing something wrong?
There may be a way to set your preferences or an extension that does what you want.
But a much easier way is to click the last or next-to-last post number at the lower left of each post. This will refresh starting at that point. I mention the next-to-last post because, for some reason, clicking the last one sometimes doesn’t work, but the next-to-last always does.
Hello All,
Being Freepers I’m sure most of you are a notch above the average computer user. However, just in case you don’t already know there’s an open source version of Microsoft’s Office called OpenOffice. It’s absolutely FREE and can be downloaded here:
http://download.openoffice.org/
For those of you who like to do graphics but don’t have deep pockets you can download the open source movements FREE version of Adope Photoshop here:
http://www.gimp.org/downloads/
YES, THESE ARE WINDOWS VERSIONS ! ! ! Open source software isn’t just for Linux any more.
I think it would be relatively easy to create a custom web browser for FR with the Mac OS X development tools. The custom browser could have all sorts of specialized features for Free Republic, like automatically appending footers to messages, improved HTML formatting, rotating taglines, improved searches, RSS feeds, etc. It could be a good open-source project, it just needs a catchy name.
Hey, thanks for that tip!
My big beef with Firefox - haven’t used IE for a couple of years now - is that I’m on dialup, so I keep the tabbing function disabled. Only sometimes it spontaneously turns itself on! Grrr
I tried someone else’s code meant to fix the problem (referenced by users on Mozilla’s blogs, IIRC), but it would lock up other functions to the extent that I killed that utility.
Once the unwanted tabbing starts, I have to close out all sessions to make it stop. It hasn’t frustrated me to the point I return to using IE, though.
This works fantastic! You're a genius. Thank you very much.
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