Amy Barzdukas, a general manager of Internet Explorer at Microsoft claims that Firefox’s one billion downloads claim is unlikely true.

“As with any marketing statement, I’d encourage people to be somewhat skeptical about large number claims. It’s an interesting number and I have not seen the math [but] how many internet connected users are there? 1.1 billion, 1.5 billion, something in that area.”

However Mozilla did not claim that one billion people in the world are using Firefox, they are counting downloads based on repeated downloads, updates, and people with multiple computers.  This why the number does not seem too far-fetched to me.

[via Guardian/Gizmodo]

Big news for Firefox fans!  The open source browser that started in 2004 has hit one billion downloads.  This includes downloading multiple copies for different computers and additional downloads for upgrading purposes.  Automatic updates were not counted.

This many users on Firefox gives the browser a 31% marketshare. Internet Explorer has 60%.  And Opera, Chrome, and Safari have less than a 5% market share.

Mozilla even started a website to track downloads on their website called OneBillionPlusYou.com. Mozilla developers are currently working on Firefox 4.0 which will be much faster than 3.0.  Image screenshots of 4.0 indicate that the new Firefox browser will look similar to Google Chrome.

Another milestone Mozilla reached this past June is 150 million downloads of Firefox 3.0.11 within 24 hours. That figure included automatic updates.

Mozilla released a minor update to FireFox 3.5. The update addresses a security vulnerability in TraceMonkey. TraceMonkey adds native compilation support to FireFox’s JavaScript engine. The vulnerability could possibly be exploited by an attacker to run code. Here is the text from the bug report.

Firefox user zbyte reported a crash that we determined could result in an exploitable memory corruption problem. In certain cases after a return from a native function, such as escape(), the Just-in-Time (JIT) compiler could get into a corrupt state. This could be exploited by an attacker to run arbitrary code such as installing malware.

FireFox 3.5.1 also addresses several stability and load issues.

All the release notes can be viewed here.

A few days ago, Apple announced that they had hit 11 million downloads of Safari 4 in less than 3 days.  That’s not a bad number, but Mozilla came up with a figure of their own that blew Apple out of the water.  Mozilla said that Firefox 3.0.11 was downloaded over 150 million times within 24 hours.

“I just read that Apple is reporting 11 million Safari 4 downloads in just three days. That’s pretty amazing. I’d like to follow up that report with one of my own,” wrote Mozilla Director of Community Development Asa Dotzler.  Both companies had probably included an automatic update that is made when opening their browsers.  The update is pushed on to users.

Firefox 3.0.11 was launched on June 11 and had mainly just a security and stability update.  On June 17 of last year, Mozilla had set a new Guinness World Record for the most downloaded browser in one day.

Google Inc. paid a good amount to become the default search engine for Firefox, but that didn’t stop Microsoft Corporation from creating an add-on for the competing web browser.  Microsoft has just created a plugin that adds Windows Live Search to the search box of Firefox and has built-in search suggestions.

“We’re happy to report that we’ve officially integrated Live Search into Firefox by popular demand,” stated Live Search managers Beatrice Oltean and Debapriya Ray.  The add-on uses Microsoft Live Search API 2.0 and is part of a project called Silk Road.

Microsoft Live Search is behind Yahoo! and Google in terms of the numbers of search queries made on a given day.  Microsoft is trying several marketing strategies to take away market share from competitors such as the Live Search Cashback program and building the internal search for Facebook.

Google has been the default search engine company for the Mozilla Firefox browser.  This is mainly due to Google’s financial support of Mozilla.  In 2006, Google paid Mozilla about $57 million which amounted to 85% of their revenue.  But now the Russian version of Firefox will be dropping Google as the default browser and switch it to Google’s Russian rival Yandex.

According to a blog post by Mozilla General Counsel Harvey Anderson, Russian Firefox users “wanted direct access to the Yandex search services in official Firefox RU builds” based on studying trends of Firefox Yandex builds.  For the Firefox 3.1 Russian locale builds, Yandex will become the default search engine.  This version will be released in the next few weeks.

In the last few months, Yandex was planning on going IPO, but postponed it until the economy recovers.  Yandex gets about 50 million searches per day.

[Via Webware & TechCrunch]

There are so many blogs out there that run on Wordpress and depend on its user interface and functionality: Pulse 2.0, TechCrunch, GigaOM, StartupSquad, Profy and Mashable just to name a few. When new versions of the software are released, you should expect that its major functionalities are bug free. I wish I could say that about Wordpress 2.1 which I have been not too happy with since upgrading. I may be the only one who is having this issue, but the biggest problem is that it does not work with Internet Explorer 6.0 or 7.0 correctly. Below is a screen shot of the back-end of Wordpress when writing a blog post whether you are TechCrunch or GigaOM and using Internet Explorer or Mozilla Firefox.

The difference is that when you’re using Internet Explorer, shows up and you can’t even click on the form to write the post. This is a major problem because this forces publishers like myself to switch to Firefox when writing posts. As a developer myself, I understand that ensuring compatibility with Internet Explorer can sometimes be tricky because the browser may not follow W3C standards. But the reality is that Microsoft Internet Explorer still has the largest market-share for Internet browsers.

Sometimes you may end up on computers that will not allow you to install Firefox because you may not have admin privelages. Does that mean I should be stuck not having the ability to update my own blog because of Wordpress flaws? This is a call to all Wordpress developers to integrate Internet Explorer compatibility. I’m certain that the publishing community would appreciate it.

I finally concocted the perfect mix of Firefox 2.0 add-ons including themes, plug-ins, and toolbars.

First is selecting a theme that is aesthetic and also complies with the text color of other toolbars. Rhetorically speaking, how cool does this theme look [screen show below]! The Firefox theme is called Metal Lion – Vista and is available for download [here]

[The scrollbars look like iTunes and the navigational scheme looks like Internet Explorer 7.0]

Secondly, there is a plugin called the Tab Effect which was Life Hackers’ Download of the Day on January 11, 2007. Here is a sample image of switching between tabs from the Mozilla web site:

And lastly are the toolbars…

Make sure to get the Google Toolbar, FoxyTunes Toolbar, and Facebook Toolbar. I used to have the Compete Toolbar, but uninstalled it because of its interference with Google search results. And also because the Alexa Toolbar is only supported for Internet Explorer, the alternative for Firefox is Quirkbiz’s SearchStatus which displays the Alexa and Google PageRank information at the bottom-right.

There you have it, folks. Firefox can’t get any better when you have those add-ons.

At the beginning of the year, Firefox was used by 9.6% of all Internet users.  By the end of 2006, Firefox was used by 14% of Internet users, which is a 50% increase in one year.  Despite releasing a new version of Internet Explorer (IE), Microsoft took a hit in the browser market this past year.  Internet Explorer marketshare dropped from 85.1% to 79.6%.

Apple Computer Inc.’s Safari browser jumped from 3.1% to 4.2%.  Opera Web browser grew from 0.6% to 0.9%.  Lastly, AOL LLC’s Netscape dropped from 1.24% to 0.9%.

In October, Firefox Version 2.0 was released and since then Firefox users have been continuously growing.  I believe that part of Firefox’s growth is also responsible for Internet Explorer’s application slower load time.  I noticed that Internet Explorer 7.0 was exceptionally slower than Firefox.  However, the new build of Internet Explorer definetely has catered to users that prefer tabbed browsing.  For PC/Mac users that have 2.0 GHz+ processors, I believe that the application load time difference between IE and Firefox may not be as noticeable.

[Source: Computerworld]

It wasn’t too long ago when Mozilla released Firefox 2.0, but now the company has released the specifications that will be placed into Firefox 3 in a wiki format. The software development life cycle is expected to complete within 12 months. The team is developing Firefox 3.0 based on the Gecko 1.9 Roadmap format which is what Mozilla had followed for the Firefox 2.0 development as well.

One of the new expected features of Firefox 3 is called “places” which will be placed to the left of the tabs. This is similar to the “Add to Favorites” and “Favorites Center” feature in Internet Explorer 7.0.

As far as tabbed browsing goes, Firefox will also implement a feature so that new tabs will open to the right of the active tab, which is also similar to Internet Explorer 7.0. However, a new feature that is unique will allow a group of URLs to open on one click of bookmarks.

According to TGDaily.com, another feature that will be improved from Firefox 2 is a feature that the new Internet Explorer lacks, which is auto-saving data in forms and posts. As a blogger, I have experienced the loss of data when writing posts by accidentally clicking on a link that replaces the page that I am writing the post on. Microsoft has added an alert button to alleviate this problem, but in some circumstances the alert does not show up. TGDaily reports: “version 3.0 will have increased session saving capabilities, including the ability to save all data logged in a single session, such as data entered into forms and posts, and the entire page viewing history.”

Mozilla and Microsoft has been having a browser war for quite some time now. In my opinion, I think that it is somewhat frustrating that between both browsers, one supports a tool that another browser doesn’t, so it is difficult to settle on one browser.

The tools I am referring to is the Facebook and Alexa toolbars. Internet Explorer supports the Alexa toolbar, but Firefox doesn’t. However, Firefox supports the Facebook toolbar, but Internet Explorer doesn’t. In terms of speed though, Firefox is clearly the winner.

Yet when it comes to embedding videos from YouTube on Wordpress and having it work properly, I have had the most luck with Internet Explorer. If anyone has had luck embedding videos on to Firefox while using Wordpress, definitely let me know.