The First 48 Hours Of Firefox 4 (Infographic)

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Firefox 4 has arrived Tuesday and is boasting amazing download numbers. In its first day FireFox 4’s 7.1 Million downloads beat Internet Explorer’s 2.35 Million. The Mozilla team put together an infographic to celebrate the first 48 hours of Firefox 4 which details the browser’s exact download numbers.

What’s interesting is the perspective of Firefox 4’s downloads over the first 48 hours. The 15.85 cumulative downloads is larger than the population of Los Angeles, California and the Internet in 1995.

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What Makes You Think Google Could Kill Firefox?

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Valleywag, ie Gawker these days, runs a story about a rumor stating that Google might stop pumping money into Firefox, and start pushing their own web browser instead, Google Chrome. The angle is pretty aggressive against Google, and the story is wrapped up with this paragraph:

It makes sense that Google would want to support its own Chrome Web browser. And yet bullying a nonprofit would seem to clash with Google’s “don’t be evil” motto. Perhaps “don’t lose money” has become more important.

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Microsoft breaks standards compatibility promise with IE8 Beta 2

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Microsoft earlier this year committed to delivering a standards compliant browser when they launched Internet Explorer 8 at some undetermined future point.

According to this article at the Register today, Microsoft has broken this promise with the release of IE8, Beta 2:

This week, the promise was broken. It lasted less than six months. Now that Internet Explorer IE8 beta 2 is released, we know that many, if not most, pages viewed in IE8 will not be shown in standards mode by default. The dirty secret is buried deep down in the «Compatibility view» configuration panel, where the «Display intranet sites in Compatibility View» box is checked by default. Thus, by default, intranet pages are not viewed in standards mode.

This is yet another reason why more than five years ago, I switched to using Firefox.

Mozilla Labs introduces Ubiquity

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Mozilla Labs has introduced Ubiquity, a new method of interacting with the World Wide Web – and one that allows you to create mashups and more integrated communications.

We’ll let Aza Raskin from Mozilla Labs explain:

You’re writing an email to invite a friend to meet at a local San Francisco restaurant that neither of you has been to. You’d like to include a map. Today, this involves the disjointed tasks of message composition on a web-mail service, mapping the address on a map site, searching for reviews on the restaurant on a search engine, and finally copying all links into the message being composed. This familiar sequence is an awful lot of clicking, typing, searching, copying, and pasting in order to do a very simple task. And you haven’t even really sent a map or useful reviews—only links to them.

This kind of clunky, time-consuming interaction is common on the Web. Mashups help in some cases but they are static, require Web development skills, and are largely site-centric rather than user-centric.

It’s even worse on mobile devices, where limited capability and fidelity makes this onerous or nearly impossible.

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A grid redesign & “refactoring” of GMail

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One of my favorite recent hobbies has been to look at CSS redesigns of Google’s GMail email system.

In my Apple oriented home office, I’ve used the Better GMail 2 extension for Firefox combined with the Gmail Redesigned 2.0 CSS Skin in order to have a vastly different GMail experience than what comes out of the box. And one that looks much sharper as well.

But without making major changes to G-Mail, Dan Rubin has refactored and relaid the GMail design onto a grid layout, added some spacing, and made a much easier-to-read and use interface for the vaunted enterprise email system. [Read more…]