The new Firefox in town

For those of you who still open Internet Explorer everyday give yourselves 2 minutes and download the new Firefox 3. You’ll be surprised on what you have been missing.

Firefox 3

What’s new?
It’s faster. It’s cleaner. It’s easier to use. I noticed a huge jump in speed on the first use, even with 20+ tabs. Good to know that both the Web Developer Toolbar and PicLens add-on updated to the latest version seamlessly.

There are a few new features and big news on the performance side. Regarding the new look, it takes a while to get used to but it think it grows on you.

Smart (social) marketing
At the launch of version 1.0 Chris Messina (actually it was a guy named Rob from an ad agency - see comments) got this crazy idea of getting people to pay for a 2-page New York Times for Firefox. It worked pretty well and 10.000 people paid and got their names of a NYTimes ad. This time they decided on a different strategy but equally smart. Firefox 3 set out to break the world record of number of downloads in 24 hours in order to bring awareness to the broswer. This resulted has resulted so far in a huge number of bloggers covering the story at the same time creating a big snowball effect that has resulted in 6,792,781 downloads so far, a server crash and a nice Power User’s Guide.

June 18, 2008 | Tags:  

comments

3 Responses to “The new Firefox in town”

  1. Chris Messina on June 18th, 2008

    Hey André — thanks for the mention, but I can’t claim credit for coming up with the crazy idea… that was a guy named Rob who worked at an advertising firm. I did help with the organizing around the effort though, and ultimately did the design that ended up in the NYTimes. But the idea wasn’t mine — credit due where credit’s due! ;)

  2. Andre on June 18th, 2008

    Hey Chris - credit rewritten.

    Thanks for being there anyway, must have been exciting! It still gives me inspiration for working on smart stuff on Adegga!

  3. Alexandre Gonçalves on June 19th, 2008

    Hey André; instalei a versão em português (dito europeu) e é completamente funcional, tendo aproveitado todas as extensões/add-ons, etc. da versão anterior sem qualquer problema.
    Pareceu-me que a ajuda online está muito bem escrita e é de navegação fácil, embora um dos links não me tenha parecido (ainda) pronto.
    A navegação é como dizes: mais rápida, mais “limpa”, mais fácil.
    O mapa dos downloads (http://www.spreadfirefox.com/en-US/worldrecord/) está muito bem concebido e é bastante curioso: nunca imaginaria que a Lituânia ou o Irão tivessem tão “bem colocados” no ranking.

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