Continue reading »]]> Believe it or not – it was 5 years ago today that the initial release of Mozilla Firefox was made, according to the Wikipedia thread here.

Hasn’t it come a long way since launch. It is the main competitor to Internet Explorer and it used by millions. As of August 2009, it apparently had a market share of 22.98% which is the biggest of any open-source internet browser by far!

Yet it’s totally free and is well supported on many operating systems – most notably Windows and Linux.

It just shows how totally awesome open-source software is and how far it can get. I’m a big fan of open-source and I think that it’s one of those things that made the turn of the 21st century!

Great work to everyone who makes Firefox, bring this brilliant software on! Take on Internet Explorer!

Continue reading »]]> Mozilla, founder of the open-source Firefox, today announced that the browser has now been downloaded one billion times!

It really shows how software that is totally open-source can be really successful.

Sadly I can’t say I’m massively influenced by this milestone, since I have been using Google Chrome for months now and have never regretted the switchover. Firefox is great but Chrome is so simple and easy to use.

Well anyway, congratulations Mozilla – and good luck for the future!

Continue reading »]]> Mozilla has recently launched the final version of Firefox 3.5.

Personally, I haven’t got round to downloading it yet, but I’ll have a crack at upgrading tomorrow, and perhaps post a review sometime over the next few days if I find anything boastable about the new version.

If you’d like to get the latest version, you can either download the upgrade from www.firefox.com or grab it from the Check For Updates link in the Help menu of Firefox.

Continue reading »]]> Mozilla, the creator of the well-known Firefox, has set a target for the release candidate of Firefox 3.5.

The company claims that they are estimating that the release candidate of Firefox 3.5 will be readily available sometime within the first week on June. This is of course providing that there aren’t any major bugs that get in the way of the release.

Between now and the first week of June, the company will be going through a number of stages for finalising the code. Mozilla claims on this page a schedule for what’s going to happen over the next couple of weeks.

Hopefully this release candidate will be something to look forward to – personally I haven’t heard a huge amount about Firefox 3.5 (other than the fact that it’s been under discussion for ages) but I’ll be testing the release candidate when it becomes available to the public.

Continue reading »]]> The Firefox 3.1 beta is now out and ready to be downloaded at http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/all-beta.html for anyone who wants it. It’s supposedly the last beta before they change the version number to 3.5, as I mentioned in a previous blog post. 

I personally won’t be downloading it any time soon as I’m going to probably wait either for the 3.5 beta or the final 3.5 release. I think the next Firefox release is definitely something to look forward to with lots of new features, so the news will be here on GEEK! as soon as it comes.

Continue reading »]]> Mozilla has decided to rename the idea of Firefox 3.1 so it becomes Firefox 3.5. Mozilla has decided that a fourth beta will be released on the 14th of April and the release will be named Firefox 3.5. 

Mozilla claims on their developer news site  that the reason for the change is because of the “sheer volume of work” which seems to make it more relevant to make it a bigger release. 

Mozilla confirmed the change in this blog post. They have said they will change the upcoming release to Firefox 3.5 before the next beta is released in April.

We shall have to see what happens when the beta arrives in our download folders, but personally I think that Mozilla just want to make the release stand out more as there is evidently large amounts of work going into it. Hopefully it’ll be something to look forward to, as Firefox is (in my opinion) beginning to fall behind a little as competition from Chrome (and possibly Safari) is falling into place.

Continue reading »]]> The web browser “war” still rages on.

It’s been going on for years. What is the best web browser? I don’t think there will ever be a final decision, although I would think most people would agree that Firefox has to be the safest and easiest way to browse the web.

The dreaded Internet Explorer is still used by millions. The reason for this is that many people just don’t know about Firefox or other web browsers. They just stick to whatever comes on their Windows PC. I suppose, if you were a computer novice, you’d just do the easiest thing and stick to Internet Explorer. Such a shame… if you use IE, you don’t know what you are missing.

Firefox is still extremely popular. It’s got just what everybody wants. A reliable, safe, fast browser that can be customized beyond belief. It is an extremely good browser – I’m using it to write this post now. It does exactly what it claims it does. It is very easy to use, I can trust it for any online payments, and I can use a huge range of plugins to make it do whatever I want it to.

With new web browser, Google Chrome, has Firefox got a challenger? Well, it has got a range of clever features. For example the tab management is very good. Instead of using just one process to manage all of your tabs, it splits each tab into a different process. This means that if one tab crashes, you don’t have to close the whole browser. And it does this without becoming a RAM-hog. Add to that it’s lightning speed launch times and Glass design (in Vista Aero), it does add up to be a relatively good browser. Google does have work to do to it, I mean it does have problems. My biggest problem is that it just doesn’t render some pages properly, and it claims that some pages are unavailable when they aren’t really.

What about Apple Safari? Well that’s good too. It has its ups and downs. I would only use it on a Mac, since I’m not a fan of the Windows version. It just seems rather pointless in Windows when you could just use Firefox, which is much more reliable and usable.

Opera? No way. I’ve never liked Opera. Again, it comes down to the same thing – why have it when you can have Firefox which is much safer and reliable. I don’t like Opera’s interface, and overall I just think it’s a no-go.

So, if you want an answer. It still remains – there is only one leader – Firefox. It just can’t be beaten for its safety, reliability, speed, and customizability. And those, I think, are the four keys to a web browser. Maybe, one day, a browser may become as good or even better than Firefox, but I think you be safely assured that it’s not going to be anytime soon.

Continue reading »]]> Ever since I found out about it, I have always been a big fan of Firefox. And then when I found out about Google Chrome, that took over from Firefox altogether. I love Google Chrome plainly because it has such a fast launch time – even on a slow computer – and it renders most code very well. Admittedly there are quite a few bugs, some of which can be quite annoying. But overall, it’s a very nice browser. The interface is good, and the tab management is very nice!

A couple of months ago Microsoft released the first beta of Internet Explorer 8. In my opinion, a total waste of time. It was slow, terrible at organising page elements, and constantly crashing. Then the second beta came out, and that was a slight improvement but nothing major.

I’ve never found Internet Explorer worth it. I think the only reason people use it is because they haven’t heard of Firefox or Chrome. If everybody knew about Firefox or Chrome, I think IE would have very few users.

Also, many people don’t have the time to worry about the browser they use, so they just leave Automatic Updates to keep updating IE whenever it likes.

Most of the features covered by IE were covered by Firefox ages before Microsoft. It seems truelly pointless to me.

What do you think about Internet Explorer? Is it worth it? Do you have a particular reason why IE is good over other browsers?