I noticed an article over at PocketLint stating that Mozilla has admitted only 25% of users who download Firefox have become ‘active’ users. As Firefox is one of my favourite pieces of software - however I do use IE from time to time before the Microsoft zealots get started - I decided to try and dig deeper to find out a more info on this intriguing stat. Searching led me to Jack Schofield’s blog on the Guradian’s website, where he states

Firefox’s claims to success have been supported by clocking up the number of downloads, encouraged by payments from Google, but it turns out that 75% of the people making those downloads don’t “continue to use it actively.”

However I was still unable to find any reference to a quote from Mozilla themselves in his post or any reference to this stat on Mozilla’s website. This annoyance aside - Schofield does point out quite correctly that 25% take-up from downloaded free software is a very good result - I was still bemused by the validity of this stat, so I decided to make up research some of my own.

Whilst I have no way of providing you with any stats regarding Firefox download usage, I did manage to find some usage stats over at counter.com They showed, based on their clients data, Firefox usage at 13% for July 2007 compared to 10% for the same month last year. Whilst IE, both 6.x and 7.x flavours combined, dropped from 82% last year to 71% currently. Make what you want of the IE drop but Firefox increased its browser share by 30% over the last year, and that’s not a bad stat in anyone’s spreadsheet analysis.

So what does all this mean? Perhaps there’s a bit of Firefox bashing going on in the blogosphere, trying to make it all sound doom and gloom when it comes out that 75% of their downloads end up in the Recycle Bin? It seems a bit strange to highlight this (non-existent?) stat when all appears well with usage overall. What do you guys think?

The internet browser Firefox from Mozilla seems to be taking off in Europe, leaping from a 21.1% share to a 27.8% slice of all net surfers over a one week period at the begining of July in 2006 and 2007 respectively according to XiTiMonitor, a web analytics company. It claims that Microsoft IE usage has dropped to 66.5% from 73.3% in the same market over the same time frame.

Are European users breaking away from the MS vice like grip on browser users? I suppose it had to happen sooner or later, with Firefox features light years ahead of IE. However Mozilla will have to pull out all the stops with Firefox 3 or Gran Paradiso as the project is called. Software users can be very fickle and development laurels should never be rested on!

Some interesting figures came out in the ‘by country’ breakdown with Firefox usage at over 40% in Slovenia and Finland, yet notably the UK well behind the leading pack at a mere 18%.

Source: XiTiMonitor

Due to a couple of power outages today - remind me why I pay my power bill? - causing a reboot I ended up upgrading to version 2.0.0.4 of everyone’s favourite browser Firefox. Well the favourite browser of 54% of the visitors to this site anyway. So what’s new in the latest release? According to mozillaZine the new version improves support for Vista and fixes some security flaws. However the browser still bypasses Vista’s Parental Controls so junior can still download dodgy pics of Paris Hilton! Happy surfing!

After several discussions of Mozilla’s developers, during last week, the features for Firefox 3 were gathered and sorted out.

Gecko, the rendering engine upon which all of the Mozilla applications rely will be tweaked for better standards and support. What worths mentioning is the ability of saving documents as PDFs. Since the PDF should and maybe will remain the main format used in exchanging documents for the upcoming years, all of us will be monitoring the development progress for this feature.

Another important feature would be the enhancing of the navigation while going back to a form using the POST function. That annoying warning message won’t be visible anymore.

The guys at Mozilla are implementing a possibility for us to use a theme or a plugin without restarting Firefox. They might even implement a plugin manager, so things can get easier as it goes.

Since security is one of the most discussed topics related to browsers, Firefox 3 will have a EV certificate support, even if limited to accepting and/or displaying them. EV certificates are more reliable and have an extended validation.

On the other hand, Mozilla is planning to get rid of the browser crashes caused by not responsive plugins (I often get that when trying to display a PDF document within the browser window), but unfortunately that got scheduled for the Firefox 4. The feature would require major code re-writing, and that would delay Firefox 3’s release date.

Last but not least, they considered implementing a crash reporting tool called “Airbag” meant to replace Talkback, and they are going to release the MSI version of the installer as well for the whole package.

We’re looking forward to try the final version of what’s supposed to be the best browser out there.

Now that we all know the hidden pages in Firefox, it’s time to go a bit deeper into tweaking your browser for optimal use. All of the operations will be made in the about:config page, so save your important stuff, open up a new tab, write about:config in the address bar and be prepared. I have gathered four tricks that will improve your Firefox experience, and here they are.

1. Fetch only pages that you click
Firefox mostly resembles to Google from this point of view. It has a built-in feature (enabled by default) that will pre-download the pages behind the links it thinks you MIGHT click. Google anticipates you might click the first result from the page, but how in the world can Firefox anticipate the link you’re going to click? Anyway, in my opinion this is just useless bandwidth usage, CPU power and HDD space. You’re practically downloading and storing pages you are not viewing. Here’s how you stop that in three simple steps.

In the about:config list, filter up your search after ‘network’ so it would be easier for you. Then, find through the remaining list options the key that says network.prefetch-next. It should be set to TRUE. Double click it, and it will turn to false. There we go, now Firefox will stop acting creepy and will only fetch what you click ;)
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I remember when I first tried Opera, that was supposed to be “the fastest browser on Earth”, I accidentally pressed a mouse button combination and weird lines started drawing through the screen. The mouse gestures (I was to find out about them later) are stylized motions of the mouse cursor itself, that can be used as forms of commands and that can be mapped to a specific action. For example, you could have quickly moved the mouse towards the left direction to go back to the previous page.

At that time I was still using Internet Explorer and new features like tabbed browsing or cached pages seemed like heaven. I started using Firefox since one and a half years ago, and I of course I sticked to it until now. With the discovery of widgets that are able to completely transform Firefox now, it does seem like the best browser on Earth for me, not necessarily the fastest.

However, I did not see the gestures feature being implemented in the core system, so I thought there might be a Plug-In to do so. Here it is. The extension allows you to execute common commands (like page forward/backward, close tab, new tab) by mouse gestures drawn over the current webpage, without reaching for the toolbar or the keyboard.

You can also use click-only “rocker” gestures which are even faster than drawn gestures. This cool plugin is compatible with your Thunderbird aswell.

I found myself staring at the “about:blank” parameter for an IE installation today, and that got me thinking if it works in other browsers too. It did. I’m using Firefox, and that cleared the address bar to a blank. And then I figured the developers HAD to include some more address bar commands and started looking them up. Here’s what I found:

about: A simple prompt without any parameter will display the Mozilla “about” information. Since it’s accessible from the top menus as well, it’s not quite a hidden feature.

about:buildconfig Obviously, it will show the build platform configuration and parameters

about:cache Will display info and statistics regarding your disk’s cache, including the name of your cache’s directory and a list of the entries you can find there. By default, Firefox doesn’t allow you to view the cached webpages, so this can be an useful option.

about:config Oh look, many many info. Indeed, it’s the most complex and meaningful of them all. Careful on what you plan to change here, your browser won’t run properly after if you play with the wrong things.

about:plugins Of course, what is Firefox without it’s powerful extensions? This option will display detailed information about all the plugins installed for Mozilla Firefox.

about:credits It’s time to give the credit to whoever deserves it. There’s an alphabetically sorted list of all the people that gave their contribution to the development of Firefox.

about:Mozilla This is a weird thing. It will display the so-called “Book of Mozilla”. Something similar was present in Netscape too. There’s actually no real book although the quotations might give you that impression.

Have fun browsing through your browser’s internal features.