Firefox 3 Sets World Record?

Published on June 19, 2008 By kryo In Personal Computing

Following Tuesday's release of Firefox 3, and despite a couple of server downtimes (due to the huge demand), the Mozilla Foundation has announced that the new version of their browser was downloaded more than 8 million times in the first 24 hours of availability! Their claim to the record of most downloads in one day is still being verified by Guinness, but it's still quite an amazing feat.

Personally, I've only just gotten the browser this morning (I first tried during one of the above mentioned downtimes), but already it seems tremendously faster than Firefox 2. I haven't really had much chance to look into the new UI elements just yet, but at least most of my add-ons (all the important ones, anyway) had updates available, and so far they all seem to be working well.

What does everyone else think so far, especially those who weren't previously Firefox users? Is Firefox 3 going to make you switch from IE or Opera? If not, why not?

Comments (Page 3)

Bebi Bulma

on Jun 20, 2008

It really came down to compatibility and features. FF is still more bare bones when it comes to built in features, but if you don't mind installing plugins you can still get all the extras offered by Maxthon or Opera(the two most feature rich browsers).

That's why I (and others) like it so much, the fact that it is so customizable and we can add so many features/themes to it through the plethora of addons available.

Compatibility across the net is still in IE's court, though thanks to the last two versions everything else sucks about it.

If by that you mean INcompatibility in displaying pages and adhering to standards...then sure.

DethAdder

on Jun 20, 2008

If by that you mean INcompatibility in displaying pages and adhering to standards...then sure

lol. I more meant most sites seem to be coded with IE in mind over other browsers

. That doesn't mean that it will work right but it is supposed to. This site is perfect example of that. There's a big announcement at the top about the site not being optimized for use with FF3, yet it works a hell of lot better than IE does here, which I must assume would be the recommended browser to use since FF3 isn't.

Bebi Bulma

on Jun 21, 2008

I believe the announcement simply means that since FF3 just came out in final, it might be a while before those "issues" get addressed. As for being coded with "IE in mind over other browsers" from what I've heard from a lot of developers, they spend more time fixing issues to work in IE since it seems to render things according to its own "standards." I've had to do that very thing on my own blog: if browser is IE, use this class, if anything else, use this one. Annoying.

Kitkun

on Jun 21, 2008

I've seen sites that refuse to support IE. Maybe it would get them to use a real standard, not their funky made up one.

All the spewing of this browser being faster than that browser is just mainly exaggeration of fanboys.

Not always. FF3 takes 1-2 seconds to start-up, vs. 6-7 for IE7. Logging in to Hotmail, takes about 2 seconds for FF3, 6-7 again for IE7. For me, at least. It's not much, but it adds up.

Extensions really are FF's biggest asset. I listed my favorites on the last page. Yes, I am a fanboy.

WIllythemailboy

on Jun 21, 2008

I've seen sites that refuse to support IE.

And that's the only reason I have FF2 on my computer. Some websites are designed to intentionally crash IE, raising fanboy-ism to new heights.

I've actually seen another employee walk into where I work, ask to use the computer to look something up, then download Firefox onto it instead of using the IE that was already there. You can't tell me that he wanted faster load times (he used FF a whole 30 seconds) or extensions, or anything else. He simply refused to use IE. I use the site he went to all the time, and it works perfectly with IE.

garion333

on Jun 22, 2008

As for being coded with "IE in mind over other browsers" from what I've heard from a lot of developers, they spend more time fixing issues to work in IE since it seems to render things according to its own "standards." I've had to do that very thing on my own blog: if browser is IE, use this class, if anything else, use this one. Annoying.

So I have I. I've had to throw in extra code to get things to line up correctly. Eventually I just threw in a line about how the site is optimized for Firefox.

And I find Firefox much faster than IE. Same is true of Opera. Pages do not load instantaneously for me in IE. Yes, program load times for IE are quicker, I'm more interested in page load times. I'm surprised people don't find IE to be slower, but to each his own.

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