The PC Report

We all remember the fuss that the European Union made about web browsers in Windows, first making Windows 7 go without a browser altogether (Windows 7 E), and then making Microsoft propose the “browser ballot screen.” Microsoft originally proposed the order of the browsers on the screen to go by market share, placing IE first. The EU rejected this idea, so Microsoft and the EU agreed on alphabetical order (see above image).

As you may have realised, Firefox isn’t in the second spot it used to be. Mozilla user experience designer Jenny Boriss, doesn’t like this layout at all, claiming there’s an unfair advantage towards Safari:

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Only two months after Firefox 3.5, Mozilla has released an alpha of the next version, 3.6, codenamed Namoroka after a national park in Madagascar. Firefox 3.6 Alpha 1 uses a new version of the Gecko rendering engine, 1.9.2, to deliver faster javascript actions as well as greater browser responsiveness. Lifehacker reports that tab previews, a feature removed from 3.5, make a return in this version.

This version is an alpha release, which means it probably is full of bugs and the like. Mozilla is warning people that only developers and testers should download this copy of Firefox, but if you want to anyway, head over to the Mozilla Dev Blog to get the links. The final version of Firefox 3.6 is expected to be finished later this year

Today (or more accurately, 2009-07-31 15:00 UTC) Firefox has reached a new milestone: one billion downloads.  It’s come quite a long way since November 9, 2004 when Firefox 1.0 was released. Now, almost 5 years later, Firefox has a browser market share of around 30 percent, looking at statcounter, and one of the largest add-on communities I’ve seen.

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Mozilla have recently released some draft designs for Firefox 3.7 (last week) and 4.0 (today). I’m all for “Embracing Glass” personally, and loving the tabs-on-top design for 4.0. Loving the progress meter below the URL bar too! It’s about time Firefox’s relatively unchanged and aging interface was updated – although they should hurry up with merging the URL bar and search bar for 3.7.

Thom Holwerda thinks that the designs suffer from “visual overload”, although I think a simple adjustment to improve this would simply be removing the page and tools text – although would that be copying Chrome’s design a little too much? Check out the full screenshots after the break

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