Firefox aims for record downloads

WEB browsing will get a new filip sometime in the next week or so, when the Mozilla team launches Firefox 3.0, an upgrade of the increasingly popular open-source browser.

It may surprise you to know that the current Firefox 2 is in daily use by about 40 per cent of web surfers, up from less than 20 per cent just a few years ago.

Microsoft's once ubiquitous Internet Explorer is down to 55 per cent, Mozilla, the outfit formed three years ago to handle Firefox and the Thunderbird open-source email application, reckons there are now more than 180 million Firefox users round the globe.

Firefox runs sweetly on Apple Macs and Linux computers as well as Windows.

It's lovingly put together by an army of dedicated open-source professionals, and tested relentlessly by millions of users.

The people at Mozilla are so excited about version 3.0 that they're organising an attempt at a world record for the most software downloads on the day of release.

The date is yet to be decided, but it will probably be sometime next week.

They have already dubbed it Download Day, and are asking visitors to the Mozilla website (www.mozilla.com) to pledge to download it in the first 24 hours.

There was plainly a way to go when Doubleclick signed on last week: total pledges round the world were about 17,000. Doubleclick was only the 370th from Australia.

After using a beta version of Firefox 3.0 for the past few weeks, we reckon this browser is pretty good.

Beta software can be a trial in more ways than one, but we have had no obvious bugs or bad moments to report.

We especially like the improved turn of speed: Firefox 2.0 could be a mite sluggish, especially on Windows PCs, but version 3.0 is up there with Apple's Safari and Norway's Opera at zipping from page to page and running web applications.

A few other features that have caught our fancy.

• The "awesome bar": (It is officially the location bar, but apparently Mozilla workers and many beta testers have given it the awesome moniker because they reckon it is). Just start entering some text in the bar where you normally type web addresses, and a large, easily-read dropdown menu appears listing suggested sites as well as references to other pages you have visited, and to Gmail messages, that contain the text. Some items have stars beside their names one click on the star and you have saved a bookmark. The new Firefox, incidentally, stores bookmarks in a database, making them much easier to find and organise than fumbling through folders. Awesome? Well that's a little strong for Doubleclick's taste but it's certainly neat and handy - the kind of thing other browsers will quickly copy, just as all did with tabbed browsing.

• Whole-page zooming. Yep, most browsers let you bump up the size of text on a web page if you're finding it hard to read, but usually it's just the text zooming. You can see the enlarged text running across images and bursting out of the text boxes that are supposed to contain it. With Firefox 3, the whole page is magnified equally, and everything stays neatly in its place.

• Resumable downloads continue from where you left off if a download is interrupted by a forced restart of the browser or loss of your network connection.

• Improved security: Firefox 3 warns you with large, unmissable notices if you head for a website that's known to have been infiltrated by hackers, or that could be a forgery, like a phony internet banking site. With a click, you can see a detailed explanation of why the site was blocked. You can ignore that, at your peril and explore the site or (more wisely) you can click on a button marked: "Get me out of here!" that swiftly transports you to the safety of Firefox's start page.

Meanwhile, Microsoft is working a new version of Internet Explorer, and IE 8 should be ready for public consumption by the end of the year.

One new trick, we're told, will be something Microsoft calls web slices.

This will allow a user to bookmark a changeable part of a website, like an online auction or a cricket score, and save it in the margin of the browser, where you can watch it changing, even as you surf to other sites.

Awesome, huh?