Firefox reaches 200 mil. downloads

[SimsHsia]

On July 31st, Firefox has been downloaded over 200 million times; at the time of this post, the Spread Firefox counter is reporting 200,404,702 downloads so far.

Here's to another hundred million.

From Spread Firefox

[kuponut]

On July 31st, Firefox has been downloaded over 200 million times; at the time of this post, the Spread Firefox counter is reporting 200,404,702 downloads so far.

Here's to another hundred million.

From Spread Firefox

My uncle(whom works for Microsoft) has been saying that IE is better thatn Firefox,he said that theyll be good in 5 years when they've worked out all the "bugs" please arm me with the knowledge to prove him wrong.

[SimsHsia]

Well so far, it appears that Internet Explorer (IE) 7 is a MUCH better improvement over IE6. When Microsoft a few years ago stopped all development on IE, and declared that version six will the last ever version, IE was pretty much defenseless against the spyware, adware and etc.

So far, IE7 is almost up to par with Mozilla Firefox (MF) 1.x; and with the new MF2 beta 1 coming out Q3 2006 (sometime this or next month) is looking promising as well. I've read a recent article about 'grading' three browsers: Opera 9.0, IE7 and MF2.0b1, in a brief summary, had these browsers having a grade of A+, B and B+, respectively.

This particular article explained how IE and MF are like kids in a classroom, you have the underachiever, IE, and the overachiever, MF. The teacher is so proud of the overachiever and it receives special attention, while the underachiever is shunned in the corner; until one day the overachiever slips its grade in a few 'tests' a few times, the underachiever begins to ascend into the spotlight be getting better grades; from getting D's to getting B's.

"On one side of the browser family you have Mozilla's Firefox, a darling of reviewers and Internet power users who love its attention to detail and strong feature sets. And on the other side you have Microsoft's Internet Explorer, long chastised as a spreader of worms and security problems and seen by critics and power users as a browser that hasn't been working hard to improve for years . . . [but] big changes came in the recent round of beta releases for each browser [, Mozilla's Firefox 2.0 Beta 1 and Microsoft's Internet Explorer 7 Beta 3]. With the betas of IE 7, the Microsoft browser has been showing its first real improvements in years."
- Rapoza, Jim. "Browser school daze." Tech Directions. eWeek Aug. 7, 2006

But wait, there's another browser, Firefox's cousin: Opera. The version 8.0 didn't get shining reviews as Firefox did, but the Opera development team came back with version 9.0; and it's free like the latter browsers.

To read the article, grab a the eWeek magazine from a friend, or online here.

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If you're uncle is talking about IE7, I agree that it will be a good browser, and will be comparable to MF1.5; but it is up to the user to decide whether one wants Internet Explorer or Mozilla Firefox. For most users who switched to Firefox, it will take a lot of convincing to go back to Internet Explorer, because of either the past experiences with the previous version of the browser, or they are so used to the current browser that they have. For the rest who still use IE, because it was the default pre-installed browser available and because there are some folks who may be lazy to switch or download a new browser, might continue along the IE tradition, and use the new browser if they were to use Microsoft's flagship product, Windows Vista, or whenever the websites they visit force them to download the latest browser.

In my personal opinion of IE, the new beta has come a long way since IE6, ever since the Trustworthy Computing Initiative started by Microsoft about three and a half years ago. During the spyware/adware wars of 2003, I like to call this the Inter-global-net war on the ad/spy wares, I found over 5,000 spyware entries by using IE6 to simply check my email and visit forums, and thus switched to MF1.0 and never looked back. But I downloaded IE7b3 so that if I were to use Windows Update, or look at websites I designed through two different browsers to ensure compatibility with both of the major browsers, to maintain a certain amount of security. Although, I must say, the CSS rendering of IE7 is much better compared to IE6, but a website design never looks as good as it does in Firefox. Yes, your uncle did say that in about five years IE may reclaim the throne of 'King Browser' of everything there is for Internet browsing, but IE7 still has a way to go in terms of compatibility with CSS, PNGs, ActiveX and etc. But it sure does have handy features, like built-in RSS, built-in phishing tools, and other such features; but, again, it is nonetheless a vast improvement over IE6.