Mozilla

Mozilla Firefox 3 hits. My grandma uses it.

I am so posting this in Mozilla Firefox 3 right now. And I’m pretty happy about that.

Sure, Opera rolled along a few years ago and made the point that a decent product could put a slight dent in Microsoft Internet Explorer’s market share.

But things lit up a bit yesterday with news that Firefox now has a whopping 19% market share.

A lot of people I know have used Firefox for a while. But that’s just demographics. Everybody I know is voting for Obama, too – I’m 20-something in Massachusetts here, after all.

Nineteen percent, though? Is my grandma using Firefox?

I’ve just downloaded this (note to my IT guys: That’s cool, right?). So there hasn’t been much time to get a feel for performance and new features. The Mozilla folks have put together this handy little guide, though.

From a consumer perspective, this thing still won’t run Netflix instant watch movies. Maybe that’s Netflix’s call? You might want to check if it works with any SaaS applications before conducting a large-scale deployment.

Then again, facing a 19% market share, maybe the people selling SaaS applications should be checking in with Firefox.

New Firefox browser nearing release

Mozilla has announced that Firefox 3 Release Candidate 1 (RC1) is scheduled for the end of May. A code freeze was implemented late last week, forcing programmers to scramble to make last-minute changes and stomp out any bugs that still exist.

Release candidates are typically the final stages of development before the new software is pushed out to users.

The latest beta version – Firefox Beta 3.5 – was released in early April and, in my experience, the results of that version weren’t exactly stellar.

Techworld notes that Mark Schroepfer, vice president of engineering, posted to Mozilla’s development blog this weekend, “The release candidates will move a little slower than beta.” The reason, according to Techworld, is because of “the need to account for more public feedback than with earlier builds.”

Or, as one friend posted succinctly to his Twitter stream: “Firefox 3 beta 5 = fail.”

I wonder if Schroepfer saw a lot of that and decided to urge his company into a more cautious route.

Personally, I’m still a Beta or two behind 5. But even the Firefox 3 beta that I use to surf the Interwebs daily is a little buggy. From time to time it freezes or just decides to shut down on its own. That said, I’m a lot happier with my latest version instead of Firefox 2, which routinely froze and forced me to reset my user preferences: Losing my bookmarks and history several times a day got old quickly.