The Mozilla Foundation, whose Firefox browser has already snared over 18 percent of the world's Web surfers, has just introduced its latest upgrade, Firefox 3. For a nonprofit outfit, Mozilla can really sling the hype. The foundation practically dared us to visit getfirefox.com on Tuesday and download the new browser, in an effort to set a world record for the most file downloads in a single day. Suckers that we are, at least 7 million of us fell for it.
And what did we get in return? A darn good browser.
Firefox caught fire in 2004, when Microsoft Relevant Products/Services Corp. hadn't upgraded its Internet Explorer browser in three years. IE 6, as techies called it, was so famously buggy that the federal government's data Relevant Products/Services security experts began urging people not to use it. Suddenly, Firefox looked especially attractive -- free, feature-rich, and far more secure than Explorer. Within a year, users had downloaded 100 million copies. By including a search window linked to the popular Google search engine, the Mozilla Foundation began raking in millions in advertising revenue. Microsoft's near-monopoly on browsers was gone.
Still, Firefox wasn't perfect. In 2007, security software maker Symantec found twice as many security bugs in Firefox as Microsoft's newest browser, IE 7. Firefox 3 aims to squash the bugs and to deliver a bunch of new features.
Best of the lot is a new address bar that begins searching for Web sites even as you type. Start typing an address you frequently visit and Firefox 3 will display links to pages from that site that you viewed in the past.
Firefox 3 has also buffed up its file download system. New files are automatically scanned for viruses, and you can see the Internet domain that's providing the file, a handy way to avoid downloads from suspicious sources. Also, there's a pause button to temporarily halt the download.
Mozilla engineers say they have tidied up the software so it runs faster and uses less memory. My own cursory inspection suggests Firefox is still a bit of a memory hog. But the new version is unquestionably faster than its predecessor, with start-up taking only about half the time.
It's good stuff, and reason enough to consider dumping IE if you haven't already. But Firefox isn't the only alternative. Opera Software is a Norwegian company that makes most of its money building browsers for cell phones. But its free desktop browser, available for PCs, Macs, and Linux computers at opera.com, is a fine piece of software.
Source: http://www.toptechnews.com/story.xhtml?story_id=11200B61ZYW0