Despite getting off to a slow start yesterday, the official release of the Firefox 3 browser was downloaded 8.3 million times (that’s the unofficial tally as of 11:16 AM PT today). Mozilla beat its goal of 5 million downloads by 3 million and set a new world record! All right, there was no previous world record, but it still represents a massive one-day adoption rate.

According to Mozilla Foundation CEO John Lilly, that gives Firefox 3 a four percent market share of browsers worldwide straight out of the gate. Mozilla’s servers sent out 83 terabytes of data during that time, and at the peak there were 17,000 downloads per second (with an average of 4,000 per second). That explains why I had to wait so long to download my copy. The browser was downloaded in 200 different countries, with the top ten being

U.S.
Germany
Japan
Spain
UK
France
Iran
Italy
Canada
Poland

Yes, Firefox 3 is big in Iran and Poland. IE doesn’t stand a chance.

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Today’s the big day for the official, no-longer-beta release of the Firefox 3 browser. There is even a campaign to make today, June 17, Download Day and “set a Guinness World record for most downloads in 24 hours.” They are shooting for 5 million. Although, I’m not sure that there was a previous Guinness record to break, so any number might qualify.

But if you are going to go for a world record, even a made up one, in a single day, you might want to give yourself some running room by starting at the beginning of the day. But instead of releasing right after midnight, the new browser won’t be ready for downloading until 1 PM ET. Before then, when you go to the Firefox download page (or here or here), you are still prompted to download Firefox 2.

I can wait another 15 minutes, and I won’t be surprised if Firefox hits its download goal. Already more than 1.7 million people have “pledged” to download the browser today. Firefox 3 has the following features to recommend it:

—Much faster load times
—Fixed memory leak problem in Firefox 2
—An “Awesome Bar” (aka smart location bar) that suggests sites you’ve visited before or bookmarked when you type a URL into the address bar.
—Better security against phishing and malware
—One-click bookmarking
—Offline capabilities
—Built-in spell-check and session restore capabilities (like Firefox 2)
—Cool zoom-in feature
—Looks better on a Mac

Here is a list of all the new and improved features, as well as known issues.

Heavy Firefox users who download it today had just better hope that all of their add-ons work. (They will have 5,000 to choose from, but maybe not their favorite ones).

Firefox is the No. 2 browser with 18 percent market share compared to Internet Explorer’s 75 percent. (Its market share is higher among early adopters, perhaps 39 percent market share). Forget the world record for most downloads in a day. The real record Firefox is going for the most-used browser, period. This release should help it gain some more adherents.

Update 1:11 PM ET: The Firefox download page seems to be inundated right now. I am still waiting for it to load. Those 5 million people are going to have to wait a little longer. Maybe they should have made opened up the download floodgates by timezone at midnight in each country to spread things out.Has anybody been able to download this thing.

Update 1:19 PM: Still waiting. Now the page loads, but it’s the old page with Firefox 2. Come on, Mozilla. There’s a world record at stake here.

Update 2:30 PM: Back from lunch. Still waiting.

Update 4:37 PM: The downloads started about an hour ago, and Mozilla is reporting 14,000 downloads a minute. That is 840,000 per hour if it can keep it up. But access is still spotty. I’m still waiting.

Update 4:43 PM: Someone sent us this “secret” link where you can download Firefox 3 from a different server than the ones on the main site. It is only for Windows. (Download at your own risk). I have a Mac. So I’m still waiting.

Update 6:50 PM: After giving up for a few hours, I am finally downloading Firefox 3.0

Update 6/18: Despite the delays and hiccups, Firefox 3 was downloaded more than 8 million times in the first 24 hours it was available, surpassing its goal by 3 million.

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Mozilla CEO John Lilly revealed more details of their stealth Data project today, which we first reported here.

In a blog post, he says “data is one of the most important pieces to faciliate understanding (and innovation), and is also one of the most under-explored areas of the modern web.” He also says that Mozilla has two early projects that touch on the idea - Spectator and Test Pilot.

The Data idea is much broader, however. “There are worlds of information about how people use the web that are locked up and not currently shared,” he says. By simply adding optional tracking software to Firefox code, much of that data could be unleashed. Mozilla’s goals with the Data project include:

1. Collects & shares data in a way that embodies the user control & privacy options which are at Mozilla’s core.
2. Enables everyone — from individual researchers and entrepreneurs (both the social and capitalist types) to the largest organizations in the world — to take usage data, mix it up, mash it up, derive insight, and hopefully share some of that insight with others.
3. Helps move the conversation around data collection and web usage forward, to help consumers make more informed decisions.

As we said before, the project is still very early, has no name and Mozilla hasn’t “staffed it very much.” But the potential is huge. Tell them in the comments below and on Lilly’s blog how much you want this to happen.

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One of the most frustrating tasks about my job is finding reliable traffic and other usage data about websites.

But today, Mozilla CEO John Lilly and VP Engineering Mike Schroepfer said they may fix that problem in the future, via the massive installed base of Firefox users.

The State of Analytics Today

There are three ways to measure web traffic.

The first is user-focused and based on software installed on user machines. Services like Alexa and Compete get users to install software on their computers and then track surfing habits to come up with best guesses on Internet-wide traffic. It works in theory, but getting enough users to get statistically relevant results has proven challenging. Alexa is famously flawed, and while Compete seems to be somewhat better, it only tracks U.S. users. Comscore is another user-focused metrics company that tends to work well for large sites, not well at all for newcomers (and it is very expensive to access their database).

A second way to determine site useage is to track traffic directly from websites. Quantcast combines user surveys with direct tracking on websites (when they can get it) to estimate traffic. Comscore also does this with certain sites.

The third way is to track surfing behaviors via records from ISPs. Hitwise uses this method to provide web analytics to clients.

None of these services are particularly accurate (as can be seen by the fact that they almost always disagree with eachother). The problem is simply gathering enough data from enough users to be able to draw a picture-perfect image of actual Internet usage. That’s why I’ve called for Google to offer users to make their Google Analytics data publicly available. Would many people do it? Just the ones that want us to trust the user numbers and page views they claim.

How Firefox Could Fix The Problem

The product is still very early, say Lilly and Schroepfer. In fact, it doesn’t have a project name within Mozilla - they simply refer to it as “Data.” But the idea is fairly straightforward. Ask Firefox’s 170 million (and growing) user base if they would like to opt in to anonymous data collection on their surfing habits. Then take that anonymized data and create very statistically relevant analytics reports for all websites.

Only a small percentage of those 170 million users would have to agree to be tracked (Lilly said 1% is more than enough) to get useful data. There are Firefox users in every country, and the distribution is fairly attractive for worldwide analytics tracking. Only 29% of Firefox users are in the U.S. 13% are in Germany, 6% in France, 4% in the UK, and so on. Firefox is now available in 50 different languages.

Of course, this would track only Firefox users, not IE, Safari, Opera and other browsers. And Firefox users as a group may have different surfing habits than the Internet as a whole. But as Firefox usage grows more mainstream, this will become less and less of a problem. Mozilla estimates that they now have 18% market share across all browsers.

If and when this launches, it would likely be the most reliable public traffic and usage data available. Let’s hope they do launch it, and soon. I’ll be the first to sign up.

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Mozilla invited a group of bloggers to its headquarters in Mountain View today for an open discussion centered around the upcoming release of Firefox 3 (currently in public beta).

CEO John Lilly started things off by pointing out that this coming Monday is the Mozilla Organization’s ten year anniversary. He described the organization as rather humble and discombobulated when it was spun off from AOL into an independent entity in 2003. As recently as 2005, when the Mozilla Corporation was created to lead development on Firefox and Thunderbird, the organization still struggled to keep its servers from crashing during “hours of terror” when browsers deployed across the world tried to update themselves at the same time (this problem has since been remedied).

These days about 150 international employees work for Mozilla, which has been divided into six organizations, including ones for Europe, Denmark, China, and Japan. The ratio between work performed by employees vs. the developer community at large stands at about 60/40. Mozilla’s fastest growing markets include China and Russia, with China seeing six-fold growth since a year ago. Mozilla has netted about 160M users globally.

Lilly and several other Mozilla employees including Mike Schroepfer, the VP of Engineering, spent a considerable amount of time discussing Firefox 3, which has been in development for three years. Firefox Beta 4 is the version currently made available to the public. Beta 5, which will be released next week, will be the last beta before a release candidate in late April or May. The final version of Firefox 3 has been slated for release in the first half of this year - in June or sooner.

Firefox 3 is meant to carry forward the motto of keeping the internet “open and participatory”. It will support 50 languages, unlike IE7, which was released with support for only one. About 50% of the extensions developed for Firefox currently work with FF3, with further compatibility expected to accelerate in May. There are about 20,000 community members testing the latest build of FF3 and submitting an average of 150 bug reports on a daily basis. Testers have been particularly vocal about moving the “home” button back to the main button area (and Mozilla has acquiesced).

The company stressed a few of FF3’s primary features. Native skinning has been implemented so that the browser looks at home in various operating systems (Mac, Windows, and Linux). The so-called “awesome bar”, an advanced version of the address bar, not only auto-completes but searches your browsing history for matches as well. Much of Firefox’s core has been rebuilt, including the way it handles history. Now more than 6 months can be searched instantaneously whereas before, the default was set at 2 weeks. And password management is more discreet; you won’t have to decide on saving a password until after you’ve signed into a site.

FF3 also includes extended security measures such as new anti-malware techniques that will prevent users from visiting sites that might infect their computers with malicious programs. The detection system relies on a blacklist of software that gets downloaded to the client periodically. There’s also more advanced SSL certificate handling and the ability to easily check whether you’re actually on a trusted site.

As far as performance goes, Mozilla is claiming that the FF3 outperforms competitors both in how quickly it processes JavaScript and how little memory it uses. The company has also been working on better caching methods that work particularly well with SSL-protected sites.

When asked about Microsoft’s recent public show of support for open standards and interoperability, Mozilla insisted that the Redmond behemoth still has a “mixed record” and that declaring support for CSS2.1 (a ten year old standard) is nothing to get excited about. The company points out that Microsoft has done nothing to support the next generation JavaScript spec and little to implement CSS3. The same goes for HTML5, the standard for offline functionality that has been embraced by Mozilla, Apple, and Opera.

Lastly, if you’re an iPhone owner who was hoping to run Firefox come summer, don’t hold your breath — the SDK license precludes apps like Firefox that interpret code. Mozilla does, however, still intend to ship a mobile version of Firefox. The platforms that will support it are yet to be seen.

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New platforms like Adobe Air and Mozilla Prism are evolving that combine the benefits of Internet flow with the flexibility and power of desktop applications. They are part browser, part desktop app and are extremely efficient for certain types of applications.

Flash, Silverlight and Ajax get most web applications over the hump in terms of usability and are the technologies behind the fast transition of desktop applications to the web. But it’s not clear that they’ll ever kill off all desktop applications entirely. The bridge between them may very well be Air and/or Prism.

Matthew Gertner, who was a co-founder and CTO of startup AllPeers before it shut down earlier this year, is now working with Mozilla on their Prism project. I asked him to write a guest post discussing Prism and how it fits into the ecosystem v. Air as well as a number of emerging technologies for using web applications offline (Firefox 3, Google Gears).

Read Matthew’s blog, Just Browsing, here.

Thanks to innovations like Ajax and Flash video, web apps are quickly gaining ground on their desktop counterparts. With a few notable exceptions like Firefox and Skype, the big software hits of recent years have been websites such as Flickr, YouTube and Facebook. And yet web-based software cannot yet equal the high-quality user experience of the best native apps. This is the reason why Apple was forced to reverse its original decision to make Safari the official SDK for the iPhone. It also explains why online productivity suites like Google Docs are still struggling to compete with stalwarts like Microsoft Office. Web apps simply don’t provide the responsiveness, performance, whizzy graphics and access to local data that users crave, and they only work when you’re connected to the internet.

Read the rest of this entry »

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The Firefox browser has been downloaded nearly 500 million times, says their SpreadFirefox website. Parent organization Mozilla is celebrating by raising 500 million grains of rice on FreeRice. That, says Mozilla, is enough to feed 25,000 people for a day.

Earlier this month we reported that Firefox 3, beta version 3, had been released. The browser has around 17% market share worldwide and 150 million active users.

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Mozilla officially launched its new Thunderbird focuses spinoff Mozilla Messaging yesterday with David Ascher as CEO. Mozilla Messenging begins with the proposition that e-mail is broken, with its goal being to fix it.

Writes Ascher:

Email and other forms of internet communications present us with a paradox. The stunning proportion of our days spent communicating online clearly indicates that as a society, we are more intricately connected via the internet than ever before….Yet as the number of such interactions grows, and as the number of ways in which we interact grows, the joy that communication can bring is too often replaced by frustration, confusion, or stress.

One common short-hand for the above is to say, somewhat flippantly, that “email is broken”.

….we see our primary role as that of facilitating collaborative approaches to problem solving and incremental progress, through a combination of leadership and facilitation work. This is an unusual approach, and it can be chaotic and slow. But it seems to have worked well for Firefox and the web, and I believe it can work well for Thundebird and email.

It’s a noble cause that starts with a solid email product that has struggled for attention next to the shining beacon of Firefox. We’ll certainly be watching to see what they come up with.

(via IW)

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When Netscape announced they were shuttering their iconic Internet browser last month, they recommended to users that they consider moving over to Firefox: “We recommend that you download Mozilla Firefox and give it a try. We know you’ll enjoy it!” (they also gave instructions for migrating from Netscape to Firefox). That makes sense, since Mozilla spun out of Netscape originally.

Today, however, they split their endorsement. In a blog post titled “Netscape Recommends Flock, Too,” Netscape’s Richard Klein describes Flock as “Firefox with social integration” and gives it his thumbs up.

The only problem is that Netscape has next to no actual users left to make these recommendations to - less than 1% market share. Flock must love the endorsement, but it isn’t going to make much of an impact on actual downloads.

We’re fans of Flock here, too (Duncan gushes, whereas I think its excellent but very slow sometimes). Personally, I’m finding Firefox 3 for the Mac the best, fastest and most stable browser I’ve ever used.

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We hear that the Mozilla Foundation is buying hiring three of the principle folks from Humanized, a small software user-interface shop in Chicago founded by Aza Raskin, the son of famous Apple interface designer Jef Raskin. Humanized has been working on improving the UI of both desktop and Web-based software, with projects like Enso and music search engine Songza. While we don’t know the amount that Mozilla is paying for Humanized, we understand the acquisition is more of a talent buy.

Songza, which is a Crunchies nominee in the best design category, was spun off as a separate company in December and is not part of the deal. Neither executives from Humanized nor Songza would comment on the deal.

Expect to see the Humanized team, which is about a half-dozen folks, not all of whom will be going to Mozilla, put their UI chops to work on Firefox or other yet-to-be-announced software projects. Perhaps new desktop apps that work both online and offline and are separate from the browser? Whatever it is, we can’t wait to see what they come up with.

Update: Mozilla CEO John Lilly confirms his interest in Humanized, but says it is being done as a straight employment agreement, not an acquisition. In a note to me, he says:

Mozilla has hired 3 of the principals from Humanized. They will be joining the Mozilla Labs team on January 16, 2008. We expect a lot of innovation work from them, some Firefox-related, some broader, just like everything else in Mozilla Labs. This was not an acquisition. No premium was paid and no intellectual property was acquired by Mozilla.

The work done by the Humanized principals speaks for itself — there are lots of great, web-relevant ideas in their work and we’re excited to have them join Mozilla.

The four main people at Humanized are Raskin, John DiCarlo, Atul Varma, and Andrew Wilson. Raskin will be joining with two of the others.

Update 2: Aza Raskin speaks. He now tells me:

I am not at liberty to say which founders will be coming with me to Mozilla. However, I will say that the person who is not coming has decided to follow their dream of pursuing ground-to-orbit transfer vehicles and jet-propulsion research. Although I am deeply sad to no longer be working with him directly, if anybody can make space travel a reality, it’s him. He’s one of the top 3 smartest people I know.

The goal of Enso, Humanized’s flagship product, is to make computers more usable for everyone. You shouldn’t need to care about which application or web service has the functionality you want — you should just be able to use that functionality anywhere. You should be able to spellcheck your file names, add maps to your emails, and translate your IMs by simply telling your computer what you want.

There is clearly a lot in common with that goal and Mozilla’s goals. Although I don’t know what the final form will be, there is a huge opportunity to make both the web and the desktop fundamentally more humane.

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