~TECH-BYTES~

We already knew that Mozilla had a record breaking day on June 17th when Firefox 3 was downloaded close to 8 million times, despite the download site not working for at least part of the morning. Now, Mozilla has announced

that Firefox 3 has indeed made it into the Guinness Book of World Records with 8,002,530 downloads. Mozilla had set itself a goal of only 5 million downloads.

If you participated in the event by downloading Firefox 3 on the 17th (and even if you didn’t, but want to pretend you did), you can now also download your own, personalized certificate from the Firefox site.

A number of analysts expect Firefox to capture a 20% market share this month and if the downloads for Firefox 3 are any indication, Mozilla might indeed be getting close to this.

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For those of you using newly released Firefox 3, or willing to give it a try, you can take advantage of a new feature that lets you set Gmail as the default for all email links — those that contain “mailto:” in them. If you’re like me and don’t have a default email client set up, then clicking these links typically launches an installation wizard for a destkop mail client, or opens some email software that you don’t actually use.

Now you can configure Firefox to launch Gmail when you click on email address links and avoid the hassle.

1) Go to Gmail and sign in.

2) While in Gmail, copy and paste the following into your browser’s address bar and hit enter.

javascript:window.navigator.registerProtocolHandler(”mailto”,”https://mail.google.com/mail/?extsrc=mailto&url=%s”,”Gmail”)

Google Apps users can use this code (but be sure to replace yourdomain.com with your Google Apps domain name):

javascript:window.navigator.registerProtocolHandler(”mailto”,”https://mail.google.com/a/yourdomain.com/mail/?extsrc=mailto&url=%s”,”Gmail”)

3) Click “Add Application” when you are prompted¹. Congrats, you just added Gmail to your browser’s list of mail clients.

4) To set Gmail as your default, click on this link and you will be prompted with a dialog box listing available email applications. By selecting Gmail and checking “Remember my choice for mailto links” you won’t have to tell your browser again. (You don’t actually need to send an email after you click that link.)

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Firefox 3 is finally live,after all those beta’s and RC’s Mozilla released its most awaited or should i say “The best firefox yet” Firefox 3.

Although firefox download day was to start at 10:30PM (IST) but it started at 11:45PM and mozilla blog reported -

The outpouring of interest and enthusiasm around Firefox 3 has been overwhelming (literally!).  Our servers are currently feeling the burn and should be back to normal shortly.  Download day will officially commence once the site goes live.  The 24 hours period will be clocked from that moment.

Some of the tweets that i posted right from 10:30PM till i managed to download it  goes like this :-

@10:28PM - its firefox download day,visit getfirefox.com download and help firefox make a world record.
@10:30PM - firefox site down
@10:35PM - let me in,i want to download
@10:45PM - that not fair am waiting for this time since morning and now site down
@11:00PM - mozilla server down..Download day will officially commence once the site goes live. -mozilla blog
@11:30PM - getfirefox.com changes looks…. displays ff3 bt link still old..
@11:35PM - downloadbutton says firefox 3 free download 2.0.0.14 for windows.. they updated the button bt why does it still says 2.0.0.14
@11:40PM - yehhhhh… button changed to ff3 n link also changed… waiting for downloads to start..
@11:50PM - yessss…. download started….
@11:55PM - Firefox 3 download complete..yupieeee

Now its your turn download and help firefox make a world record..

Google has updated their Firefox toolbar (an update i was desperately waiting for )to make it compatible with Firefox 3 - the browser that is due tomorrow.

There aren’t any new features in Google Toolbar 3.1 except that it now works with Firefox 3. Also, the beta version of Google Toolbar 5 is only available for IE browser.

Mozilla has been announcing Release Candidates for Firefox 3 consistently for the past month. In fact, Firefox 3 RC 3 was just released earlier today. One could guess that the time for an official release was right around the corner, but we wouldn’t have guessed it’d be this soon. Only hours after RC3, and after 34 months of development, the company has announced that Firefox 3 will be officially released next Tuesday, June 17th.

What To Expect

If you haven’t given any of the Firefox 3 RC’s a shot, I can personally tell you that it’s fast! Stability and performance has been consistently better than Firefox 2 with each RC. Memory usage has been down significantly over long periods of time compared to Firefox 2 where memory continued to rise with prolonged use. Features and fixes for Firefox 3 include:

• Updated address bar with integrated bookmarking functionality
• Standard themes that are consistent with the native UI of your Operating System (Windows, Mac, Linux)
• Revamped bookmark manager
• New Icons
• One-click site information
• Secure add-on updates
• Vista Parental Controls
• Revamped password management
• Full page zoom
• Scrolling Tabs
• One-click bookmarking
• Tags for bookmarks
• tons more!

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