Firefox World Record: Are you in ?

The Mozilla team is going for the world record with the official release of Firefox 3. They want to be the most downloaded software in the first 24 hours after release ever. I’m saying ever because this record attempt is a first, there is no magic number to beat and it will be the first entry in the Guinness Book of World Records.

Firefox 2 reached about 1.6 million downloads in the first 24 hours and that’s probably the figure that needs to be reached as a minimum but only the sky is the limit as the FAQ on the page points out.

Dedicated users can pledge to download Firefox 3 during release day. It’s a pretty nice table sorted by countries. Currently more than 79K users have pledged to download Firefox during release day with the United States taking the lead followed by Spain, Poland and Germany.

If you want to pledge to the cause visit the Spread Firefox site and add yourself to the list. The release date will be published on that site as well.

via Sparx

Extend Firefox 2 Results are up

The winners of the Extend Firefox 2 contest have been announced yesterday. The contest did end on December 31th of 2007 and saw more than 100 entries. The task was to create a Firefox add-on in time, the prices travel and accommodation to a Mozilla Developer Day, a 15″ Macbook and several others. I don’t think that most participants did enter the competition for the prices though.

The three Grand Prize winners are Tony Farndon from the United Kingdom for his Minimap Sidebar Extension, Massimiliano Mirra from Italy for his SamePlace add-on and Jay Meattle from the United States who created the Shareaholic add-on.

Minimap Sidebar Extension displays a minimap in the sidebar. Maps can be easily created by drag and drop or by right-clicking the information. It’s a real time saver if you have to lookup maps regularly.

SamePlace is a multi-network Instant Messenger add-on that makes it possible to chat with buddies from many IM networks in Firefox.

Shareaholic is a great add-on that lets a user add pages that he visits to popular social bookmarking and news websites like delicious and digg.

Mozilla Firefox Live Chat Support

The Mozilla Firefox forum and knowledgebase is already an excellent way to receive support if you are facing troubles with Firefox. I was able to solve more than one problem this way in short time. Mozilla recently introduced a new possibility that is even better because you get support (almost) in realtime.

The Firefox Live Chat Support is run by volunteers who know then ins and outs of Firefox and can help with almost any issue that you might be facing. What I really like is that the waiting time before you are connected to an agent is slim to none most of the time. Once the chat is loaded you can have a friendly chat with a support representative who is friendly and takes his time to chat with you.

I’m used to fast calls or chats when talking to representatives normally and this is a welcome difference. A test that I conducted revealed that they, or at least the agent that I was chatting with, knew a lot about Firefox. The agent did not just copy and paste knowledgebase articles but tried to explain everything in common words.

RIP Netscape ! Recommends Firefox

AOL has finally decided to get rid of Netscape and lay it to rest in the beginning of next year. Netscape was once a huge competitor to Microsoft’s Internet Explorer which changed when Microsoft decided to integrate Internet Explorer into Windows. There was no way - at that time - to break this unfair advantage and the better browser suddenly lost huge market shares.

The final blog post at the official Netscape blog is answering some frequently asked questions about this decision and recommends to use Firefox with the Netscape theme and extensions instead.

I’m not sure why but I always thought of Firefox as a worthy successor of the Netscape browser. And it seems that the time is right to break the marketing domination with a free and better browser. It is a sad day nevertheless.

Firefox 3 Website Concepts

The Mozilla team will release a new version of the Firefox portal during the release of Firefox 3 and are currently considering four concepts that they published in a jslater directory on their website. John Slater happens to be the Creative Director at Mozilla which means that these concepts do have some weight and are not merely wishes of a fan.

I thought I make a screenshot of each concept and put it up here so that everyone can take a look without having to visit the website. The website has only four links to the concept images and one called Brand Insights. If they want an advice, I think they should make a thumbnail of each image as well and post that.

After seeing all four images I think I would vote for number 2, the one called agile, with number 1 being a close second place. Which do you prefer ?

Firefox 3: Make the switch or wait ?

The Mozilla Firefox team did release Beta 2 of Firefox 3 just two days ago and with each passing Beta I’m asking myself if I should make the switch to Firefox 3, wait or use both versions next to each other. Most extensions do not work right out of the box though which is probably the greatest concern besides that this is still a Beta and not a release candidate or the full version.

Firefox 3 will be an awesome browser. The developers managed to get rid of some of the memory problems that seem to plague Firefox 2 users and incorporates several beloved extensions into the main product. The release notes are a bit sparse on the changes in Beta 2 compared to Beta 1, here is what they say:

Firefox 3 Beta 2 includes approximately 900 improvements over the previous beta, including fixes for stability, performance, memory usage, platform enhancements and user interface improvements. Many of these improvements were based on community feedback from the previous beta.

Should the Mozilla team overthink their public ftp strategy ?

The availability of an untested Firefox 3 Beta 1 version on the public Mozilla ftp site has shown it once again that this information makes it on the big news sites such as Digg. This sends masses of users to the ftp which is neither prepared for the storm nor ready to deliver a version that has not been tested.

The Firefox development team reacted and created a webpage for users who wanted to reach the ftp site by clicking on a link at Digg.com. This article explained why it was not advised to download this version yet unless you wanted to take part in the beta testing process. Their reasoning was that the version was untested, did not make it through quality tests yet and that it was not mirrored properly.

What bothers me a little bit is that they do make this unfinished version available on a public ftp especially if they know that this can cause massive confusion on part of the user.