Today in Technology: Firefox Mania Strikes Again – Crosses the 30% Market Share Line July 1, 2009
In case you didn’t know, Mozilla yesterday released Firefox version 3.5 – it’s first major upgrade of the browser since last year’s v3.0 release. What’s getting so much press today is the amount of downloads it’s getting, and how that buzz has enabled the browser to cross the 30% line in market share (according to whos.among.us). Have a look for yourself (note the lack of Opera’s market share….looks like Unite hasn’t taken hold just yet):
Now, I know that these numbers are somewhat approximated, but it still is remarkable that Firefox has made so much of a splash in the web browser market when every PC sold comes with IE ready to rock.
The new version of Firefox includes some interesting features, the most of exciting of which to me is its supposed much faster speed when running web applications inside the browser. Perhaps the biggest reason for this is Firefox’s new JavaScript engine (at least for web apps using JS) called TraceMonkey. From Mozilla:
TraceMonkey adds native?code compilation to Mozilla’s JavaScript engine (known as “SpiderMonkey”). It is based on a technique developed at UC Irvine called ‘trace trees‘, and building on code and ideas shared with the Tamarin Tracing project. The net result is a massive speed increase both in the browser chrome and Web?page content.
So far the test have proved that the browser is a good deal faster than the previous version I was running. Speed tests with Safari 4 that I’ve done have also shown the new Firefox to be slightly faster when loading content intensive web pages and applications.
Firefox 3.5 has crossed 5.8 million downloads, and at this rate (~35-40 downloads per second currently), should reach 10 million by tomorrow or early Friday. Have a look for yourself at the download stats provided by Mozilla themselves: This was taken over at their site, check it out
More from Techcrunch here:
I, and perhaps a lot other people who downloaded FF 3.5, backed out of it, because of its lack compatibility with my favorite extensions. Extensions are one of (and perhaps the top) reasons that people use FF.
Most of the gain is in JavaScript, and savvy web users almost never use JavaScript, because it has security holes and is usually used for tracking, web annoyances, and other nefarious purposes.
I’m also literate, not a vidiot, and thus rarely use multimedia, so only a big performance gain is noticeable. I use the web primarily for information, not for entertainment. That was its original purpose.