Mac users rejoice, Mozilla engineers are working hard to bring to you more and more multi-touch goodies for the Firefox browser. Starting with FF 3.1 beta 1 Mac users have seen added support for multi-touch gestures. Now, in beta 2 there are even more gestures such as allowing users to toogle through tabs with a twist. However, adding this support wasn’t easy as Apple has been very secretive with providing the necessary APIs to developers to fully support the supported gestures on OS X. They have been criticized for keeping them to themselves and using them to enhance only their products such as iPhoto and Safari; a Firefox competitor. Mozilla hasn’t opening broadcast these features mostly because of the way they had to discover them and add support. Mozilla isn’t the only company though that has had to resort to reverse engineering to add functionality to their programs. While Apple is working on making the API available to developers they seem to be dragging their feet to retain a competitive advantage by only officially supporting the gestures in their programs for now.
Full Article: TG Daily
The Mozilla team has officially set the world record for the most downloads in a 24 hour period at 8,002,530 since they just received work from Guinness World Records today. Some other stats tidbits, since 2004, the launch of Firefox, they have captured over 180 million users in 230 countries. To date, FF3 has been downloaded over 20 million times. Congrats to Mozilla on another fine release!
Source: Mozilla Blog
Firefox 3 has been download roughly 8.3 million times in a 24 hour period as part of their download day. This number equates to around 83 terabytes of data served up by the fleet of Firefox servers. That same amount of data would be contained in 8 1/2 full copies of the US Library of Congress’ print collection. This is a truly impressive feat and just goes to show how large the internet has become. At its peak, the total bandwidth consumed by downloads was 20 gigabits/sec.
Full Article: Data Center Knowledge
This is just a reminder that today is Download Day for Firefox 3 so that they can break a record. You have until approximately 1:00 PM EST (1700 UTC) June 18th to download Firefox from Mozilla so that it can count toward the record. I have already did my part, and now you should too!
Download it now!
Everyone get ready to help Mozilla break a record next Tuesday when Firefox 3 is released. If you haven’t already, pledge to download on the official release date, there are about 1.1 million pledges so far. I’ve used the second release candidate for about a week now after I saw two of my most used extensions finally supported version 3 and I must say it is very impressive. It is noticeable faster than FF3 and the adjustments to the style are very nice. There are also a lot of new features added to the browser such as the improved download control center and tagged browsing to help you get to where you want to go faster. They also have a neat feature that will help you know when a site is not one it claims to be to help keep your information safe. It is definitely the top browser out right now.
Source: Mozilla Developer Center
Mozilla is setting up to attain a Guinness world record for the most downloads in a 24 hour period when it launches Firefox 3.0 in mid to late June. In preparation, Mozilla has set up a world record promotion page to encourage download parties and download pledges. Also on Tuesday, Mozilla released the second release candidate of Firefox 3.0 in response to 10 performance and stability bugs. Firefox 3.0 has come a long way since the 700 bugs it contain in November 2007 when it also faced rumors that it would ignore bugs in order to release the browser on time.
Sounds like a lot of fun, hope they get the record. I know I’ll be downloading it when it is released. I’ve tried the beta and it is great, but I am holding off until all my extensions are supported which should be by the time it is release.
Full Article: The Register