Prompt's Blog

A nod to open source success, Firefox is 5 years old today!!

Early coverage of the browser in 2004 noted a few interesting facts. According to Linux.Ars' Eric Bangeman, Firefox had its 1.0 release on November 9, 2004. He reported, "Getting there took 19 months, two name changes, and several hundred nightly builds" --and thankfully Mozilla has seen all of that hard work pay off!

As Ars technica notes, now five years later, the search engine boasts more than 300 million daily users and has been downloaded over 1 billion times.

Happy birthday, Firefox!

Labels: Firefox, open source

Microsoft has made a great deal of improvements to its browser, mostly due to the innovations of other browsers like Firefox and Chrome which have been eating at its market share. It has become faster at loading pages, more add-ons and it has added helpful features like crash recovery and tab isolation to prevent the loss of data. There are a lot of good reasons to use Internet Explorer 8. For people that are buying new machines and haven’t already installed Firefox, there is also less of an incentive to install other browsers if IE gives the majority of the speed and functionality that most people are looking for.

But Microsoft has launched a smear campaign against Firefox and Chrome and released a data sheet comparing IE8 with Firefox and Chrome with numerous false statements. Webmonkey had a post breaking down all of Microsoft’s exaggerations.

Microsoft says it has superior privacy and that is not true. The fact is that as far as privacy is concerned, they are all about equal. IE8 does not support the amount of web standards that either other browser does. Its claim that it is faster than other browsers due to easier navigation is hilariously untrue, and browser speed tests all confirm that IE is slightly slower. It’s not very noticeable to the average user, but it’s a fact that Microsoft shouldn’t be addressing.

It’s a very strange move by the Redmond-based giant. The company has been trumpeting its increased focus on openness at the same time as it releases a document deriding open source browsers. What Microsoft should do is focus only on the benefits of users moving to IE8. It still is the dominant player in the market, and if it was able to convert the majority of its users from IE6 and 7 to 8, that would be a tremendous coup. Comparing it to other browsers and having its comparisons publicly mocked is not helping.

(Image from Webmonkey)

Labels: Chrome, Firefox, IE8, Internet Explorer, microsoft

Today is the day we (well, at least us geeks everywhere) have all been waiting for, the general release date of Firefox 3.

While there have been a few problems with the Firefox site uptime so far today, download it now on this seemingly working link.

This will clearly be a world record for most downloads in a day, so join in and get in while you can. I'm also very curious to see if Poland will end up the #2 country in downloads when all is said and done.

For more information, read about its top 10 features. Be sure to follow our newsletter this Friday for Dave Wilby's appraisal of Firefox 3 day after its completion.

Labels: Firefox, Guinness World Records

I came across a story in the Boston Globe the other day about a grandfather who built a Web browser for his grandson. Why would he do that, instead of using Firefox, you ask? His six-year-old grandson has autism and can't use a normal browser.

Too many options confused his grandson and made him react with violence. The grandfather, being in the software industry, took it upon himself to build the browser for his grandson. After looking for tools online, and not finding anything, he created it himself with the software company he runs. He named it the Zac Browser For Autistic Children in honor of his grandson, Zackary.

It eliminates many of the distractions that a normal web browser would have, and simplifies it so that autistic children won't feel too overwhelmed and lose confidence while surfing. Here's a video that shows what it does:

The best part, besides helping the grandson? The man who built it made it open source so that anyone can download it and see if it helps an autistic loved one. This is symbolic of the open source community in general, the philosophy that the greater good is more important than money. Open source companies are successful because of this philosophy, not in spite of it.

Although not his main goal, I'm sure he will see business benefits because of this article. His software company, People CD, was prominently featured in a Boston Globe article because of what he did. The article itself was surely read by hundreds of thousands of people, and links spread like wildfire on prominent geek sites and blogs. That's just one article, and the Zac Browser was in other prominent publications, such as PC Magazine, PC World, US News and more. Surely, a percentage of them will search for his company to read more about it, as I did before writing this.

This truly heart-warming story shows that doing good can pay off.

Labels: autism, Firefox, open source, web 2.0

Mozilla is asking people to pledge to download Firefox 3 on the date of its launch. The goal: to set a new world record (one that doesn't exist yet), certified by Guinness World Records.

This is a noble endeavor for several reasons. First, it would mean a world record for open source software. And what better way to have one than for everyone to come together as a community within a 24 hour period to set it? This is a great idea and I'm excited to see what it will mean for open source.

You wouldn't see this happening for a Microsoft product. Firefox is the best browser out there, and Firefox 3 is poised to be nine times faster than Internet Explorer 7. Nine times!

Fun trivia fact: The US leads in the amount of download pledges at present. The country in the #2 spot? Poland. Firefox must go good with kielbasas.

Labels: Firefox, Guinness World Records, Internet Explorer, Poland