Firefoxed

So Firefox has reached over 8 Million downloads within 24 hours which is an incredibly large number for anything. What makes it more impressive was that they were hoping for a mere 1 Million. I suppose today was the day that the little guy managed to stand up to a giant such as Microsoft and really make a difference.

I downloaded the new browser last night and so far I’m very impressed. Sites seem to load a lot faster and I like the fact that when I quit with multiple tabs open I can save them and automatically go back to those sites when I return. The actual memory usage of the software is also much lower which means if you open multiple tabs you’ll see less hanging time. However I am hating the fact that the default theme looks like the decor from a German S&M brothel (although on Windows it’s a lot more attractive, Mac-heads are clearly into a bit of light bondage) and the suggestions in the address bar is so massive it’s clearly made for the visually impaired. Needless to say there is already a plug-in to get the suggestion bar back to its old size.

So of those 8 million + people I wonder which are new Firefox users and which were current Firefox users? Firefox currently enjoys around 17% of the market and Internet Explorer (which is made up of IE 6 & 7 users). A few years ago (maybe 3 if my memory is correct) Internet Explorer had over 90% of the browser market. If even half of these downloads were new Firefox users we’re going to see those numbers shift a percent or two. Either way the publicity attached to this fact is going to get Firefox a lot of new users.

Today signals a great victory for open source software and shows us something interesting; that being the potential downfall of Microsoft. In so many arena’s the once giant has become bloated and not the best option to service a few different needs. Windows, Hotmail and even Office (which were industry leaders for ages) have been superseded by better, faster and free services.

The point of this post? Well not much but I think it’s an incredible fact that a piece of open source software was downloaded so much in one day. As an advocate of open source this is excellent and proves that bigger certainly isn’t best. Considering I have no idea how Firefox even makes any money it’s incredible how their developers have churned out such an excellent product. Firefox 3 is awesome, not only technically but also for what it stands for.

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