As part of their redesigned community site, Opera has also released a bunch of new banners and buttons (dropping the Superman-like mascot). Since I like to promote both Firefox and Opera, I think I’ll try to pair up these two buttons:
Tag: Mozilla
Corporate Acid
The big news in web browsers this week is the formation of the Mozilla Corporation, a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Mozilla Foundation. So far it looks mainly like an accounting change so that they can work more easily with businesses that aren’t quite sure how to deal with non-profit partner. Firefox, Thunderbird, etc. will of course remain free and open-source. I’m optimistic about the change—being a for-profit company doesn’t seem to have hurt Opera much.
Speaking of Opera, they’re close to passing Acid2 in-house. They seem likely to be the next browser to pass (after Safari, iCab, and Konqueror). The next question is: Who will be the first to release a final version that passes the test? Safari and Konqueror still only pass on the development branches, and iCab’s still in beta.
75m Firefoxes!
Whew! The Mozilla Foundation has logged 75,000,000 downloads of Firefox!
Take that number with a grain of salt, of course. At least some of those are manual upgrades (from people who don’t want to wait for the auto-update to kick in), and some are one person downloading it in three places. But it can’t count the copies pre-installed with Fedora Core or Mandriva Linux, or downloaded via P2P—and some of those downloads are immediately pushed across a LAN or stuck on a USB keychain to be installed on a dozen or more computers.
It does show that Firefox continues to hold people’s interest, and the continuing rise in Gecko percentage in web traffic stats shows that, Bill Gates’ comments notwithstanding, people do use it.
Spinning Beach Balls of Death!
The Mozilla-based Camino web browser for Mac OS X has just launched 0.9 alpha 1, and the release notes include this item:
Rarely see “beach balls of death”.
I don’t remember whether I’d heard the term before (I recall the “spinning pizza of death,” or maybe of doom), but I knew exactly what it meant.
Last of the Lazy Lizard
While cleaning the apartment this weekend, we found a long-forgotten bag of “Lazy Lizard” Mozilla Coffee. RJ Tarpley’s, the company which sold it (and donated a percentage of profits to the Mozilla Foundation) disappeared last summer. By September, I couldn’t even find a whois record. The domain name has since been picked up by a link farm.
It was decent coffee, and it helped support some good software. And I got a nifty mug while they were still in business. There was maybe half a pound left, but 12-month-old decaf coffee just isn’t fit to drink anymore, so instead of brewing one last pot in salute, we tossed what was left.