Firefox Blazes Towards 20 Million Downloads


After just 10 weeks, the new Firefox 1.0 browser has passed 19 million downloads and will blow past 20 million by the month's end, surpassing everyone's expectations. Free versions are available for almost anything out there (Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux) in over two dozen languages. But suppose you just use Internet Explorer, the web browser built into Windows. Is there really any reason to download something else? Definitely...



Let's talk features. Ever use Google to search the web? If not, you're the only one. Firefox has a field right in the toolbar where you can type your keywords. Just hit Enter and get your results.

Annoyed by popup ads? Firefox blocks them by default. Many other ads can be blocked by right-clicking on them and selecting "Block images from...", which will make ads from some popular ad hosting sites disappear from every site you visit. (Pity this doesn't work for Flash animation ads, but it's a step in the right direction.)

One of the hottest features in web browsers these days is called tabbed browsing. Most every newer browser on the market supports it, though Internet Explorer still does not. The idea is that when you come across a link you're interested in, you can open it in a background tab while you continue reading (to do this, hold down the Ctrl key and click the link in Windows, or hold down the command key and click the link in OS X). You can do this multiple times for different links as you continue reading the article. Then, when you're ready to read the background material, just click the tabs to bring up the pages, already loaded and waiting for you.

There's a nifty twist that Firefox adds to tabbed browsing when used with bookmarks. Say there are half a dozen news sites you check every morning. If you group all those bookmarks together in a bookmark folder, you'll see an "Open in tabs" option below your links when you click to view the folder. Click the "Open in tabs" option and all the links in that folder begin loading in tabs. By the time you've browsed your first news page, the others are already loaded and ready in the other tabs.

Once you've worked with tabs, you'll wonder how you got along without them. They're really that useful.

Windows users in particular have another reason to try Firefox: security. Some of the most commonly exploited security holes in Windows are found in Internet Explorer, much of which was designed well before the security risks of the internet were fully appreciated. While it remains to be seen if Firefox is truly more resistant to exploitation, until it overtakes Internet Explorer it will be of lesser interest to attackers.

On Mac OS X, Firefox is somewhat less compelling because Apple's Safari browser sports many of the same features: integrated Google search, tabs/open-in-tabs, popup blocking, etc. Still, there are benefits to Firefox that will attract a following, particularly among web developers, such as the DOM inspector and the Javascript console.

If you feel that it's time to give Firefox a try, just click here and become one more step on its way to 20 million users.

Posted: Thu - January 20, 2005 at 05:12 PM          

©