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.

Speed up Firefox

[BobWeiner]

This may have already been mentioned, but here's a link [freerepublic.com] on tweaking Firefox to make it even faster on a broadband connection. I've applied these settings and notice an immediate performance boost.

"Reader" Asa...

[ronobot]

...is likely Asa Dotzler, Mozilla's chief quality control and testing guy. Congrats to Asa, and the rest of the team. I can't imagine browsing the internet without Mozilla, and especially Firefox.

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 [theinquirer.net] 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."

what makes it better are the plugins, my top 5

[Steve_Jobs_HNIC]

here they are:

Adblock [mozdev.org]
Session Saver [extensionsmirror.nl]
Web Developer [mozdev.org]
IE View [mozdev.org]
Target Alert [bolinfest.com]

Re:Speed up Firefox

[naylor83]

Only, Firefox ignores values above the maximum 8, that is, it only ever does a maximum of 8 requests (or whatever).

Re:what makes it better are the plugins, my top 5

[tehshen]

And before the complaints come,

Slashfix [hardgrok.org]

Re:BEFORE applying settings!!!!!

[naylor83]

See my above reply. Firefox & Mozilla never do more than 8 requests. Setting a higher value is pointless.

Re:Serious Question...

[kryptkpr]

If you like the awful way explorer manages files, you've never tried anything better.

Try this [totalcmd.net].. I've been using a *commander since the days of MS-DOS 5. Once you go split-panel, you don't go back. Not to mention stuff like built-in ZIP, RAR, FTP (archives get treated as folders, FTP is treated as a drive), a Search that works MUCH better then explorer's, wildcard file selection, .. I'm gonna stop now.

Disclaimer: I have nothing to do with TotalCmd, other then loving their product.

Re:And it still doesn't...

[buro9]

about:config

browser.xul.error_pages.enabled

Set that to true

You forgot an important one

[bogie]

Flashblock
http://flashblock.mozdev.org/

It turns all of those flash ads into little buttons you can press if you wish to view what's there. I rarely have to even use it since most flash these days ends up being in ads. And if you visit a site that uses Flash for something important it can be unblocked. Its really the bee's knee's.

It works so well that I don't use Adblock anymore. Really its the flash ads that slow things down and honestly I think Adblock slows page rendering down anyway although I did used to be a big booster of it. When the ads come down and are then removed it makes it seem like the page is taking longer to load and this in on a 3Mb dsl line. Anyway I highly suggest people use flashblock. Ieview, cutmenus, and of course session saver which is also great.

Re:Count me out of the FireFox craze..

[I confirm I'm not a]

I guess if you're dumb enough to fall for the phishing lures, IE is probably an ok idea.

I'm replying to you, partly because I disagree with the "IE is probably an OK idea" (even for dumb people ;) , but mainly because I don't want to draw attention to the troll you're replying to.

The Macworld article is refering to the recent IDN exploit that affects many browsers, but not IE. Macworld presumably considered this newsworthy because the exploit (a) affected Safari, and (b) didn't affect IE. However, IE had already suffered similar exploits, covered here on Slashdot and elsewhere. I had a quick peek on Secunia to see if I could find it, but got sidetracked by the pretty colours on the graphs:
IE [secunia.com]
Firefox [secunia.com]

Bottom line: IE is still horendously insecure, while Firefox has very few issues, and what few issues it does have are patched quickly.

The sad thing is: I use IE. Apart from the security issues (I don't use it enough to be affected - I use Firefox normally, naturally ;) it's not a bad browser. Trolls like the GP don't help its case. The really sad thing is: one day soon there'll be trolls like this evangelizing (or trying to...) Firefox.

Re:Serious Question...

[skadus]

It's not what you're looking for, but since you're hitting ctrl+tab, it's not much of a big deal to hit win+r to start the run box. It'll open a new program ([win]+[r], c: [enter] will start explorer pointed at c:), but it's almost as good.

That's how I browse my files, actually. It's relatively fast, and if you have a general idea (and autocomplete) you can get your stuff a hell of a lot quicker than clicking a bunch of plus signs and file folders.

Re:What would make it better

[Anonymous Coward]

You can use Firefox as a local filesystem browser. Although it isn't yet quite as usable as Explorer (after all, it's a WEB browser) I find it perfectly adequate.

Re:Err go Ego

[_Hellfire_]

GATES: We're responsible for the creation of the PC industry.

For some more information on why this statement is utter bullshit, I recommend Fire in the Valley - The Making of the Personal Computer [fireinthevalley.com] by Paul Freiberger and Michael Swaine. It is a very in-depth rundown on who did what, when how and why to get the PC where it is today. Hefty book but it's told like a story with interviews and quotes from those that started it - yes including Mr Gates.

Um, swtich Ctrl-Tab to Alt-Tab, perhaps?

[Anonymous Coward]

If you, say, open Firefox to browse the web, and maybe you also open Windows Explorer (or whatever) to your filesystem, then you can do this really cool thing with Alt-Tab. You can switch between them! (You can even click the little title buttons at the bottom of the screen if your cat's on the keyboard!)

Oh, and the *really* super-groovy-cool thing about it is that the filesystem window will *automatically* remember where you are when you're Alt-Tabbing! You Alt-Tab back, and there you are, right where you left off! (Oh, and you can Alt-D to type in a different filesystem path.)

Seriously, demanding one application does *everything* is the wrong way of thinking (even for emacs... /me ducks). Do one thing and do it well is the classical UNIX way of thinking. Sure, you *can* use 'lynx' as a text editor (with a bit of code), but wouldn't it be better to use $EDITOR.

Re:Power of open source?

[hkmwbz]

"There's no market for browsers you have to pay for."

Sure there is. Opera has its niche market, and in fact, the company is growing rapidly.

phenomenal demonstration?

[NekoXP]

Phenomenal?

It took them 7 years to get this far.

Don't get me wrong, I use Firefox every day. But let's remember Firefox was not
the primary goal of the Mozilla Project, but a fluke messaround of a couple of
engineers to strip the browser down from an unweildy "suite" to what people want:
an IE replacement.

If Mozilla weren't being so contrary in the very beginning and decided to go the
route diametrically opposite to competing with IE, we'd have been there years ago.

Neko

Re:More = Better?

[sepluv]

this very page (Slashdot) appears totally corrupted

This was fixed in Gecko in May 2004 on the trunk which is used by the latest stable version of Mozilla Suite (but not on the aviary branch).

To fix it in Firefox:

get a recent nightly build--I find them just as stable

get the new minor stable version (1.0.1) which is coming out this month

just install the Slashfix extension [slashdot.org].

BTW the bug only occured sometimes if your machine was fast and it was rendering /. too quickly--you could try reloading--it was a genuine bug as it occured intermittently, but the awful slashcode HTML doesn't help (esp. their use of evil many-nested tables for layout--see the funny and informative Why tables for layout is stupid [hotdesign.com]).

Sage cannot reload my RSS feeds

Sage? (BTW, how can you imply that MSIE is better than Firefox in this regard when MSIE doesn't even support RSS feeds.)

I guess I'd somehow like Firefox to "emulate" MSIE when it comes to viewing some "incompatible" sites

It already does to some extent. It is called quirks mode. It uses that mode to render /. as /. is not standard-compliant. Go to page info on the page context menu to see which mode it is using for the page--quirks mode will kick in if a page isn't standards-compliant.

There's always tech evangelism [mozilla.org] (or filing a tech-evang Bugzilla [mozilla.org] bug)

Konqueror could pretend to be another browser

So can Firefox. To do it on the fly in Firefox, use the User Agent Switcher [mozilla.org].

Re:In other news

[bcmm]

Well, several will have come from my sig being displayed in your web browser, another few off them were created by grep and your shell as soon as you typed the command, and, if your machine is like mine, the majority are inexplicable...
Usernames of other users of the same P2P network that you use maybe? (I had at least one of those)

Of course in my case it didn't help that I use the word llama at random, for example when I have already used the variable "test"...

Re:Serious Question...

[ToLu the Happy Furby]

Or just win+e to open Windows Explorer...

Re:what makes it better are the plugins, my top 5

[Calroth]

Since nobody's mentioned this yet... in Windows (and probably Linux), you can force a reflow by changing the font size. Hold down Ctrl and scroll the mouse wheel up, then down. (Or down, then up.)

It's become almost subconscious for me to do now, just like middle-clicking links to open new tabs.