Labels: Firefox, Mozilla, Vista

On November 9th, 2004, you all started a movement. Spread Firefox, supported by tens of thousands of contributors, took just 99 days to deliver 25 million downloads of Firefox to a world of people desperate for a better Web -- a Web that didn't overwhelm them with pop-ups, a Web that didn't infect their systems with viruses and spyware, a Web that was fun again, simply put, a Web that worked.

In less than six months, you all doubled that number to 50 million downloads, turned open source into a household word and reasserted the supremacy of choice and simplicity.

It took the Spread Firefox global community of activists only one year to reach the 100 million downloads mark and to let the world know that innovation was alive again on the Web.

And just one year ago you all helped to double that number again, to 200 million downloads. More than 50,000 of you, with Spread Firefox buttons and banners, not only helped Firefox achieve an amazing download milestone, but you all helped to make Firefox one of the world's most recognized and respected brands.

Today, you all have done it once again. With your amazing efforts, Firefox has reached 400 million downloads and demonstrated that not even the world's most powerful companies can keep people from a better, safer, and faster Web experience.

Labels: Firefox, Internet

Firefox... what happened to you? Consuming gross amounts of memory, slower and slower as releases go by. You were supposed to be a slim browser usurping Mozilla by virtue of simplicity, shedding the feature creep and lack of engineering that had convoluted the Mozilla suite. Now you have become the very thing you were created to kill: a bloated browser.

Labels: Email, Firefox, Internet, Mozilla

Recently a Mozilla observer and contributor asked why Firefox isn't treated as a typical for-profit, commercial effort, and why we are giving up the chance to get rich. This is a great topic for discussion, I'm glad it was raised. I've got a very strong opinion on this, and am quite interested in what others think.

There are many reasons why Firefox is a public asset, built for public benefit rather than private wealth.

To start with, we want to create a part of online life that is explicitly NOT about someone getting rich. We want to promote all the other things in life that matter -- personal, social, educational and civic enrichment for massive numbers of people. Individual ability to participate and to control our own lives whether or not someone else gets rich through what we do. We all need a voice for this part of the Internet experience. The people involved with Mozilla are choosing to be this voice rather than to try to get rich.

For now I want to concentrate on why I have always believed -- and still do -- that Firefox can not become a tool for some people to get rich. And why I believe the organizational home for Firefox (the Mozilla Corporation) must remain dedicated to the public benefit.

Labels: Firefox, Microsoft, Mozilla

The first official Firefox 3 beta release was tentatively scheduled for late July. The beta has now been pushed back due to performance regressions and the need for extra front-end development time, and the roadmap has been altered to reflect a new release plan. According to Mike Schroepfer, Mozilla's vice president of engineering, the developers intend to issue a new pre-beta milestone release every six weeks until the program achieves beta status.

"We are driven by quality, not time. We want to Firefox 3 to be something that we are all proud of," said Schroepfer in a statement. "The Firefox front-end has had significantly less development time than the platform and has yet to have the opportunity to innovate on top of infrastructure built for places, password manager, and others. So we'd like to give them until M8 to continue to develop user-visible features on top of the core infrastructure."

A release is still scheduled for the end of the month, but it will be referred to as Alpha 7 and will not meet Mozilla's requirements for the beta designation. According to the revised roadmap, the Alpha 7 release will coincide with the Gecko feature freeze. Gecko 1.9, a long-awaited update to the HTML rendering engine used in Firefox, uses the Cairo rendering engine and features greatly improved reflow code.

Labels: Firefox

Microsoft's Internet Explorer browser may have the lion's share of the general market, but when it comes to security professionals, Mozilla's Firefox open source browser is an even contender, according to a security survey released Monday.

Security-minded people also were quicker to try out Internet Explorer version 7, researchers with the SANS Institute found, though it didn't appear to sway Firefox fans, and the general public quickly is catching up in IE7 adoption.

"Security people are overall more aware of the flaws in Explorer and more likely to play with other browsers," says Johannes Ullrich, chief research officer at the SANS Institute and chief technology officer for the Internet Storm Center. "More common users might not feel comfortable trying out something new. Not as confident."

While IE generally garners about 79% of the browser market, Firefox is just as popular as IE when it comes to security types, the survey shows. Frantzen's survey also shows that that 50/50 stat has held pretty steady over the past six months.

"It isn't that Firefox is really more secure per say, but [Mozilla is] typically patched faster," says Ullrich.

Labels: Firefox, Internet, Mozilla