Prompt's TechBlog

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.

(Image credit: Lifehacker. So if you're wondering why there's a robot in the picture, you'll have to ask them. I just thought it looked cool.)

Labels: Firefox, Guinness World Records

# posted by James Gerber at 9:25 PM  | 1 comments | Blog home

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

# posted by James Gerber at 7:31 PM  | 0 comments | Blog home

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

# posted by James Gerber at 4:09 PM  | 4 comments | Blog home