Krishna Srinivasan’s Blog

Mozilla has officially made history with a new Guinness world record for the largest number of software downloads in a 24-hour period.

The final record breaking 8,002,530 downloads for Firefox 3.0 took place in June with parties in over 25 countries.

“The enthusiasm and creativity of Firefox fans was key to making this happen” said Marketing head Paul Kim.

Gareth Deaves of Guinness World Records called it “an extremely impressive accomplishment”.

The official figure was confirmed after logs from download servers were audited and checked to ensure duplicate and unfinished downloads were not counted.

Mr Kim told the BBC: “The notion of going for a world record, as gooky and nutty as it may have sounded, was a really sticky idea.

“It was an idea that translated really well across national borders and to all different kinds of people around the world.”More>>

For those who never used it, Google Browser Sync was a Firefox extension that synchronized your bookmarks, web history, browser sessions and passwords across multiple computers by temporarily saving them to Google’s servers. According to the Google Browser Sync team: ‘It was a tough call, but we decided to phase out support for Browser Sync. Since the team has moved on to other projects that are keeping them busy, we don’t have time to update the extension to work with Firefox 3 or to continue to maintain it.’ For all of those who fell in love with Google’s Browser Sync, our only hope now is to resort to poorly maintained 3rd party extensions without Google’s blessing.”

The feature, Private Browsing, would have disabled all caching, cookie downloads, history records, and form data used during the current session. In essence, you could surf the Web and leave no fingerprints.

“It basically said to the browser: I would like what I’m about to do to not be logged anywhere,” said Johnathan Nightingale, Mozilla’s “human shield,” aka its security user interface designer.

He described the private browsing process as this: you hit a button and everything past that point isn’t logged. Then, at some point in the future, you hit the button again and it’s as though what you just did never happened.

One possible use might be when someone other than the computer owner uses the browser.

“We looked at ways to do this, but the problem is that it touches a lot of code,” Nightingale said. “Because there are such rich interactions with Web sites and mashups and things like that, we didn’t want to put in something that was half baked.”

You can hear more of my interview with Nightingale on my Security Bites podcast here.

Firefox boosted its share by 0.6% in May, accounting for 18.4% of the browsers used during the month and putting it within shouting distance of a major milestone, according to Net Applications Inc. “Firefox is trending to hit 20% market share sometime in July,” said Vince Vizzaccaro, the company’s executive vice president of marketing, in an e-mail.

Net Applications’ May figure represents a record for the open-source browser, which resumed gains that had been interrupted in April when its share dropped slightly. The one-month increase was also the largest by Firefox since March 2007.

“Firefox is surging again, but their gains when reviewed over time aren’t out of the ordinary,” said Vizzaccaro. “Other than the stagnation Firefox experienced in mid-2007, their growth has been fairly consistent.”

Vizzaccaro was referring to several months last summer when Mozilla’s flagship browser slipped in market share, including May 2007 (down 0.9% from the previous month) and July (down 0.2%).

Although Vizzaccaro didn’t pin all of Firefox’s increase on a change last month to its update dialog, he did note the new approach. “Mozilla has implemented a change in Firefox 3.0 [Release Candidate 1] where the installation now has a checkbox that defaults to making Firefox your default browser,” he explained. More>>

The newest version of our favorite open source web browser, Mozilla Firefox 3, offers dozens of new features and fixes, but only a handful will make the most dramatic difference in your everyday browsing. After 17 months of alphas and betas, Mozilla’s finally made a feature-complete release candidate available, so it’s time to spotlight the biggest improvements that will make “Gran Paradiso” the browser to beat. Nearly everything in the open-source app has gotten a second look from the minds at Mozilla, from back buttons to bookmarks, address bars to add-ons, passwords to performance, and the changes will make Firefox 3 worth the upgrade come its official release date, slated for sometime next month. Let’s take a look at the 10 best upgrades in Firefox 3, and how they’ll bolster your browsing, after the jump.

10. Souped-up Add-ons manager

9. More intuitive interface overall

8. Stronger phishing and malware protection

7. Improved download manager

6. Native looks for every system

5. Streamlined “Remember password” handling

4. Smart bookmarks

3. Places Organizer replaces the Bookmark Manager

2. Smart Location Bar learns how you browse

1.Insanely improved performance

Read the full article here

If you’re like me, you’ve been playing around with the beta releases of Firefox 3.0. The new version of the open source browser is better-looking, uses less memory, and feels snappier all around. There’s just one problem: Every time they release a new beta version, some of your extensions and add-ons are bound to stop working. With the release of Firefox 3.0rc1, almost none of them work.

Fortunately, there is a solution that will “fix” all of your extensions at once. But I caution you, it’s not for the weak-hearted. The fix doesn’t take longer than a few seconds, but when it comes to troubleshooting your browser afterward, you’ll be on your own.

I can’t repeat this enough. DO NOT TRY THIS unless you are comfortable editing the advanced preferences of your browser. And don’t do anything until you’ve read through this entire post. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

In my experience, extensions that worked with Firefox 3.0b5 will generally be stable with 3.0rc1. It is possible, however, that some of them will cause the new version of the browser to crash. It might even crash on startup — which means, obviously, that you won’t easily be able to undo the fix I’m about to describe.

The key to the fix is to prevent Firefox from checking its version number before it tries to load extensions. To do this, you will need to set a new preference value. Point your browser at the URL “about:config”, then right-click on the preferences list to bring up the contextual menu. You should see an option that says “New.” Select that, and choose “Boolean.” When it asks you for the preference name, type “extensions.checkCompatibility” (without the quotes). You have to enter the name exactly. For the value, choose “false.”

Now restart Firefox. When the browser comes back up, it should give you a warning that version checking is disabled. You can double-check under “Tools:Add-Ons” to make sure everything is activated once again.

If the worst case happens and the browser won’t start after you add the new preference, you’ll need to remove it by hand. Locate the file “prefs.js” within your Firefox profile directory and edit it with any text file editor to delete the line with the preference you just created. (If you’re not comfortable doing that, then as I’ve said, this fix is probably not for you.)

Also, you’ll want to remember to delete the preference once the final version of Firefox 3.0 is released, or else you’ll never be certain that your installation is stable.

I had an interesting discussion today about Firefox with Mozilla’s Mike Schroepfer and Mike Beltzner. One of the things we drilled into a bit was the address bar in Firefox 3 (download). It’s being called the “awesome bar” at Mozilla, and while it will end up with an official name eventually (the “smart location bar”), what it does for users can fairly be described as awesome. And as it’s probably the most important touchpoint in the browser, it’s worth exploring not just what it means for users but for Mozilla as well.

The Firefox 3 address bar helps users auto-complete the URLs they type in, but it’s smarter than it appears at first. The choices that pop to the top of the list as you type are not based just on best text match, but on your previous behavior. Sites you visit frequently pop up higher on the list. Bookmarked sites also get special treatment. And since Firefox now has a new high-performance database to record your behavior, it can track what you do over a long period of time; it doesn’t have to flush your history every week or so to keep the performance up. More>>

Apple Inc.’s ploy to gain browser market share by pushing Safari to users with an update tool normally used for security fixes failed to boost its overall share, a Web metrics company said yesterday.

Instead, Safari’s share fell last month to 5.5%, down from March’s 5.8%, while Microsoft’s Internet Explorer increased its dominance by growing to 76% from March’s 74.8%. It was the first time Internet Explorer (IE) gained share since October 2007.

In late March, Apple started using its Windows software update tool — previously used only to provide patches for iTunes and QuickTime — to offer Safari 3.1 to users who did not have the browser already installed. More Details>>

TechCrunch noted Thursday that Mozilla was about to celebrate its 500 millionth download of Firefox, the open source browser that has made inroads into Microsoft’s dominant market share. By this morning, the official Spread Firefox site was claiming an additional 340,000 downloads, putting it over the half billion mark.

That’s an impressive download rate — one that has given Firefox an approximately 17 percent share of the browser market. Looking at visitors to NYTimes.com, a much larger share of our online readers, about 28 percent in February, were Firefox users. The bulk of our online readers use various versions of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer (about 60 percent) and Apple’s Safari (about 10 percent).

But we also noticed that tens of thousands of our visitors use various versions of Netscape Navigator, the nearly defunct browser owned by AOL, as well as a variety of other, more obscure browsers. It made us wonder why people choose the browsers they choose. Let us know about what’s behind your choice in the comments section.

With the release today of beta 3 of Firefox 3, we are definitely getting closer to the final release of Mozilla’s open source web browser.

But for a third beta this version of Firefox 3 includes some fairly significant changes from the previous betas, including changes to the main user interface of the browser.

By far the biggest change is the inclusion of what is being called the keyhole interface for the Back and Forward buttons on the browser toolbar. This keyhole essentially combines the two buttons into a single composite button that is shaped like, well, a keyhole.

In the keyhole the Back (which tends to be used more than Forward) is the larger portion of the button. The Forward button becomes a smaller button to the right of the Back button and a drop down menu to the right of the Forward button lets users view all pages they have browsed in that session, with the page they are currently on shown in bold type.

In general I liked this new keyhole modification to the Back/Forward buttons and found it intuitive. However, some users may be a little confused at first.

The Star button in the address bar has also been improved somewhat, making it possible to bookmark a page with a single click and get more detailed bookmarking information with two clicks. However, in my usage of the betas I’ve come to dislike this star button as it sits right next to the drop down button that lets users view pages they have visited. As a frequent user of the drop down I have accidentally clicked the star several times, often bookmarking pages I had no desire to bookmark.

Other usability enhancements include improved site finding accuracy in the autocomplete features in the address bar, as well as better icon and interface integration for users on Mac OS X and Linux. Read More>>