It’s official – the Guinness World Records has bestowed Firefox 3 as the most downloaded software in 24 hours! From June 17 to 18, the browser was downloaded over 8 million times. Weeks before Firefox 3 was ready, Mozilla rallied Firefox users to download the browser on June 17 Download Day and gathered 1.7 million pledges. Now, the total number of downloads worldwide stands at 28 million, and Singapore contributed about 130k downloads. Not too bad a number, considering that the numbers from our bigger neighbours aren’t very much bigger. With Firefox becoming more popular, I’m still baffled by the fact that some media websites still don’t work properly in the browser. Cross-browser testing as part of the 101 of web development somehow just hasn’t sunk in.
Absolutely, I’m using FF3 on a Mac as well, and it’s much slower than on Windows Vista. Government sites seems to prefer IE. Just try some of the National Library sites – Firefox doesn’t work all the time for some pages.
Standards-compliant web design is still a foreign concept to many people. Just try and run a W3C validator on your typical Singapore government website, for example.
Firefox 3’s a definite improvement over its predecessor, but the improvements aren’t standardised across platforms. I feel FF3 for Mac still lags behind Windows and Linux, as it always has, especially when it comes to plugin compatibility. Google Notebook still slows my Core-Duo iMac with 2GB of RAM to a crawl, whereas, my ancient ThinkPad T43 with a geriatric 1.7Ghz Centrino remains zippy while using the extension.