Lee Kelleher’s Weblog

Today is Firefox 3 Download Day! Mozilla are hoping to set a Guinness World Record for most software downloads in 24 hours.

At the time of writing, over 1.2 million people have pledged to download Firefox 3 on the Download Day!

This is a first attempt of this record, so there is no number to beat. But Mozilla want to outdo the number of Firefox 2 downloads on its launch day, which was 1.6 million! The aim is 5 million+!

Update: It’s official, Firefox 3 set a Guinness World Record for the most software downloads in 24 hours. Reaching 8,002,530 downloads! They even give me a certificate for taking part … feels like I’m back at primary school! (so proud!)

I used all sorts of add-ons and extensions for Firefox, (I’ll get around to writing a blog post on that soon too). Since I do a lot of web-development, I switch between Firefox and Internet Explorer frequently during a build.

To make this easier, I’ve been using Grayson Mixon’s IE View Lite. But with the latest upgrade (version 1.3.2), it broke in Firefox 2.0! (This made me sad)

I’d been holding out for the next upgrade - to see if that would fix the problem… but nothing came.

So I emailed Grayson to see if there was a potential fix in a future release; which he promptly replied:

IE View Lite 1.3.2 and 1.3.3 are Firefox 3 only. If you want to continue using Firefox 2, you should use IE View Lite 1.3.1, the only difference being compatibility updates for Firefox 3 that broke backward compatibility.

I’ve now uninstalled version 1.3.2 - reverting back to 1.3.1 - and everything is good again! (Thanks Grayson).

It does concern me that support was dropped for Firefox 2.0 in favour of version 3 (which is still only in beta) - cutting out a large proportion of the user-base. But I guess once Firefox 3 has shipped, no one will be bothered anyway.

I feel like I’ve been living under a rock for the last couple of months.  I’ve only just heard about Mozilla’s Prism - and it’s already changing the way I use web-apps.

Prism, (previously called WebRunner), is essentially a Site Specific Browser (SSB) - meaning that it’s a desktop application designed to host a single web-application.  This is good for many reasons, foremost it causes less distractions.

So far, I have prisms set-up for most of the Google apps that I regularly use: Google Mail, Google Calendar and Google Reader.   Now each of these web-applications are not open as separate tabs in my Firefox, but as individual desktop applications.  (Now I don’t have to worry about finding my Gmail tab in Firefox, nor about browser-crashes.)

It reminds of Microsoft attempted to do with HTA - but it seemed more difficult to interface them with external web-applications.

You can read more about Mozilla Prism on their Lab’s blog. [http://labs.mozilla.com/2007/10/prism/]