13th
Jun-2008Should You Download on June 17th?
Bruce Almighty, the movie starts of with Bruce, a TV Reporter, asking an old woman, who owns a Patisserie -
“So tell us mama, why make Buffalo’s biggest cookie?”
“Well, man from the health department say he find rat pellet in store. I say no is big chocolate chip. So we close store down, clean up, and make big cookie for to bring back customers”
I see no difference in that and this -
Come June 17th and there is going to be this multitude of people from around the world, who are just going to download Mozilla Firefox v 3.0. Why? Just because they are attempting to set a world record on the maximum downloads of a single software in 24hrs. What a creative reason to set a record?
So what is so great about this download spree that the guys at Mozilla are hyping about? Does the people who download it get a free mug every day for the rest of their life? Or is it something like the spam mail, ‘If you dont download Fx in the next 24 hours, your system will be infected by a deadly strain of I love Fx virus!!!‘.Its all for the sake of a record and damn publicity!!!
I use Fx and its not that i wont be using 3.0. Its a great browser and i’m sure just like the way it has changed my browsing experience, it has done for millions. The plugin support is amazing. To download it on that particular day is a personal choice. I agree. But just because you like a piece of software doesnt mean that you need to join a drive just to download it.
The way i see it, is as a smart marketing strategy. If they are really as good at the cookie that they sold, then why do they need such a drive. If a product is good, people who use it becomes the biggest marketers for it. They spread the word and the number of people who are using it expands. Why does Fx3.0 need such a drive? Fx2.0 was brought in with a big bang. But it suffered as it began to eat up memory. A normal session of Fx2.0 with 3-4 tabs open is enough to consume 10s of MB of RAM.
Memory is cheap, i agree. But that doesn’t mean that an application can take up as much memory as it desires. I’m not too good at judging as to what is wrong. But can say that the memory management was poor in Fx2.0. At the time when Fx2.0 was released people with normal browsing habits found that the systems slogged badly, Windows and Linux alike. They opted to move out. Intermittent releases didn’t solve the version either. How annoying is it when you get a new version to download every couple of weeks?
Fx3.0 is hailed to be faster and secure. The Release Candidates a.k.a Beta are better than Fx2.0.
… As several of the linked posts below accurately reported, we’ve decided to add one more beta in order to make further improvements in the areas of polish, performance, memory, and overall quality … [from Mozilla: For the Record]
The question remains, are they still the same old Patisserie reopen by making a big cookie, after the Health Dpt. shut’em down?
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[June 13th, 2008 at 10:58 am]
“The Release Candidates a.k.a Beta ”
Err.. The release candidates and Betas are slightly different.
Beta’s are the ones where “Almost, Not all” bugs have been sorted out.
A release candidate, is one where there are no known bugs/issues and if there are no issues reported on a RC, then RC itself becomes the Release. But Im sure u knew that
FF3 is good, very good. FF2 was not bad, sure it was a bit leaky, but it was light years ahead of IE5/6. And I know that u used to use FF2.
Anyways, sure there is a publicity involved in it. But more than that, I think its for the fun of it. I don’t think firefox as such requires an ad. Usage base for FF has been growing steadily.
Take a look here -> http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp
Moreover open source software requires strong backing from a large user base, without which they can crumble pretty quickly, and since Mozilla will not be able to commercially advertise (Funding, or the lack of it), such initiatives will help Firefox reach to user base which otherwise would have been happy to use IE.
[June 14th, 2008 at 11:24 am]
Browser wars are tightening up.
IE8 looks promising
Opera is great.
Fifefox is getting better marketing.