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Mozilla surpasses 50 million Firefox 4 downloads
OPEN SOURCE SOFTWARE HOUSE Mozilla is serving about 2,000 downloads of Firefox 4 per minute at the moment, and has passed the 51 million mark according to its nifty download counter.
Mozilla launched its latest version of the popular Firefox web browser last week, managing to get one over on Microsoft by beating its 24 hour download 'record' for Internet Explorer 9 (IE9). Microsoft had claimed that its new web browser, launched a week before Firefox 4, had managed to clock up an impressive 2.3 million downloads in 24 hours, only for Mozilla to confirm to The INQUIRER that Firefox 4 racked up over four times as many in its first 24 hours.
A week on Mozilla is still finding significant demand for its web browser, with its publicly available download counter glow.mozilla.com showing about 2,000 downloads per minute when we looked just now. At the time of publication the overall count was over 51,200,000 downloads.
Earlier, Net Applications revealed that 3.6 per cent of all Windows 7 users were running the IE9 web browser. Mozilla's Firefox 4 wasn't far behind with 2.8 per cent of the pie but unlike Microsoft's browser, Firefox runs on just about every operating system out there and perhaps most importantly Windows XP. As Windows XP users look for an up-to-date web browser, it is likely that both Google and Mozilla will see their usage shares increase.
The impressive sustained demand for Firefox 4 should make those who felt that Firefox had lost some of its shine to Google's Chrome think again. It is rather embarrassing for Microsoft, too. µ
Tags: Software
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Unfortunately Firefox4 does not cache anything larger than 5MB, meaning you need to re-download lots of stuff like videos to see them more than once and meaning you cannot get videos and such from the cache.
In short it's a bit of a failure (but welcomed by the media conglomerates..)
So yeah stick with the old version until that is sorted, if ever.
Just because something is "new" doesn't mean there are improvements. If Bob's sites aren't working with the new browser, or his cherished extensions don't function, what really is there to gain from this new browser? I know that I have avoided Thunderbird 3.0 because the new browser does not correctly sort my messages with the same priorities as TB 2.0. Some may find that a weak reason, but it was a deal breaker especially when TB 3.0 provided so little value over TB 2.0.
The same can be said about Firefox 4.0. What does it really bring that is so compelling to switch? I stayed with IE for a long time because it had certain features such as inline autocomplete and session splitting on a new window (i.e. it copies your browser session history to the new window) which Firefox did not have. Only after Microsoft sabotaged its browser by removing inline autocomplete did I bother to switch to Firefox, as both their address bars are equally useless.
Most people will not bother switching browsers until there is a real compelling reason to do so. This is why people just don't bother switching from IE to supposedly superior browsers Firefox. These "superior" browser simply don't bring anything exceptional to the table, and, at least for myself, I don't see much in Firefox 4.0 that will make it worth the effort of testing out a newly released browser.
To bad MS, if your going to sit on your ass and not keep up with the times,you will lose. Once people leave you and use another browser it hard to get them back. Besides when you push anti phishing, by being so kind as to keep an eye out at the web sites I visit, well dah, its pretty obvious how you have hood winked the populace into giving you permission to view what sites they visit so you can make money off the ads that get placed.
Bob, Firefox 4 is ready, just some add-ons and websites aren't up to the challenge...don't moan when a decent vendor updates something to work on the latest version of a piece of software, which it appears yours can't manage...
Its not ready. My web printing add-on doesn't work with 4.0. It doesn't work with my brokerage on-line account. It may be faster, but it is a mess. Now I will try to go back to 3.6+.
NOT READY FOR PRIME TIME!