Friday, November 18, 2005

Firefox earns some bragging rights.

Also, I just spilled some coffee on my desk.
by AC - permalink


A third release candidate for Firefox 1.5 appeared this morning. RC2 was so stable that there shouldn't be much of anything in RC3 testing to keep it from becoming the final build. As a lot of Opera people like to point out, Firefox is still a 4.9MB download, a third larger than Opera 8.5's 3.6MB. But 1.5 has had software auto-updating since some of the earliest branch nightlies, and the RC2 to RC3 update was a massive 218k. So you can now update Firefox roughly sixteen times faster than you can update Opera.

Also this morning OneStat reports that Firefox's usage share is now at 11.5% globally and 14.1% in the U.S. Netscape Browser is now at 0.26% worldwide, which honestly is just way too high. Opera is still under one percent after a big jump in downloads after 8.5 was released as freeware. I'm not sure why. There's no way average users have all tried Firefox with Adblock - or IE shells Avant Browser or Maxthon, which both have native adblocking - and couldn't go back to the new awful, flashing world the web has turned into. Then again, just about every non-IE user is a power user and knows all about adblocking.

Speaking of Maxthon, I tried it out for a couple of weeks and ultimately went back to Avant Browser. It's a little easier on the system resources than Avant, which is nice if you're tight on RAM. But the UI is bland and less thoughtfully laid-out, and the tab interface is less powerful and much buggier than Avant's. I was actually using Opera and K-Meleon both more than Maxthon, which is a quick ticket to uninstallation.

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