Mozilla CEO, John Lilly has hinted in an Interview that we may be seeing Firefox Mobile in a few weeks time. If the reports are true, we may see an alpha version of Firefox Mobile very soon. An excerpt from the interview:

“We want to make sure that the Web on mobile is more like the Web than what the mobile industry offers today, which is closed, separate networks and not a very good information-getting experience for the user. The first thing is to bring Firefox to mobile devices. We’re working on that, and we’ll see some alphas in a few weeks.”

It’s now official. Firefox 3 has been officially entered into the Guinness Book of World Records as the most downloaded software in a 24-hour period. Last month on the first day of its release Firefox 3 was downloaded over 8 million times; 8,002,530 to be exact.

Of course, Firefox3 didn’t exactly have any competition since this was a new world record category that they just made up, but we can’t deny that over 8 million downloads in a day is an impressive feat in any case.

“The notion of going for a world record, as gooky and nutty as it may have sounded, was a really sticky idea. It was an idea that translated really well across national borders and to all different kinds of people around the world.”, said Mozilla Marketing head Paul Kim.

Firefox …

Mozilla has announced that they have set a new world record with over 8 million downloads of the Firefox 3 browser from Tuesday to Wednesday of this week, and they are just waiting for the Guinness folks to come around and verify the numbers. While we do like Firefox here at the ‘Brick and use it as our default browser, we did have a few questions about this record attempt in general.

For starters, there was really no Guinness record for the most number of downloads to begin with, so beating a record that was not there was a shoe-in for the company. Also, if someone wants to shoot it down it just might not be all that hard since Adobe says that 8 million Flash Player installs is just an average day. YouTube servers out over 100 million videos each day and what is the torrent download count at, like over 5 billion?

Skyfire is a new mobile browser that promises a nicer browsing experience on your mobile phone as well as speed and simplicity. Right now it’s in private beta mode and just available to those with a US phone number.

According to the site, the browser can go anywhere and get anything, which would make it a nice step up in mobile browsing. Supposedly it just like browsing on your PC. Check out a demo of Skyfire after the jump. If it’s even half as good as they claim, users are going to be very happy indeed. At least it has a cool name. Things always sound cooler with fire.

Mozilla has decided to get down to business about developing a mobile browser and have recently hired two developers experienced in mobile Linux-based applications to start building a mobile version of the Firefox browser. The company didn’t give any dates on when they thought the new browser would be available and it might be a little early to know what types of phones it would be able to run on, but they did let us know it wouldn’t be this year.

We would love to see something in the way of mobile from Firefox soon and hopefully sometime next year. The longer Mozilla takes the stiffer the competition will become and already the company will have challenges getting into mobile devices with Microsoft and Apple. Both of these companies run their own browser on their respective platforms which integrate nicely, but that certainly hasn’t stopped Firefox from swaying a chunk of users already with desktop browsers. Here at the ‘Brick we currently see over 38% of our readers using a Firefox browser and that percentage continues to rise. Opera Software will be another tough competitor having had a mobile browser in the market for a number of years already, but Mozilla feels there is till room for another and possibly better option.

According to the Spread Firefox blog over 400 million downloads of the Firefox web browser have occurred since it’s launch just 3 years ago in November of 2004. The post spelled out a little history of the spread of Firefox, citing 25 million downloads in the first 99 days of the browser being available. Within a year they had over 100 million and another 100 million the year after that.

This 400 million downloads doesn’t necessarily mean that there are 400 million installations of the browser running out there, but it is nevertheless impressive considering Microsoft pretty much had a monopoly on the browser market just a few years ago with Internet Explorer. In fact the last 30 days here on the ‘Brick show that 42% of our readers are using Firefox which is up from 35% about a year …

Opera has released the Opera 4 Mini Beta browser for non-smartphones to be able to surf the internet seeing pages how they are and not distorted or requiring special “mobile” web pages. Users can download the browser now for free and follow the instructions on your phone to get it installed. There is also an Opera Mini 4 Beta for Palm and Blackberry devices that require a manual installation.

The Opera Mini 4 works by gathering pages through the Opera servers and “shrinking” them down to be viewed in full with their original format on your mobile phone. The new browser comes with a number of cool features to make navigating the web and individual pages easier for phones without a lot of extra controls for navigation.

‘X marks the spot’ zooms in on the likely beginning point of the page and expands the …

It looks like our estimate of thousands of downloads of Apple’s Safari web browser for Windows was a little bit on the conservative side. Apple has confirmed that there was over 1 million downloads of the browser withing 48 hours of its release last Monday. While this may sound impressive for most companies this product has a lot to live up to, even in cross-over world of PC’s since it’s iTunes sibling has had over 500 million downloads for use on Windows machines.

Safari as a whole also has a long way to go in the browser market as well. According to Apple the browser has about 5 percent of the market compared to the 15 percent of Mozilla and the strong 80% lead that IE continues to hold. A rocky start with some security …

It was only Monday that Apple announced and released the Safari web browser for Windows touting unmatched security and speed. While these features may hold true for Safari on the Mac, within hours of the release significant vulnerabilities started cropping up from three different independent researches testing out the browser in the new Windows environment. When all was said and done, eight different security risks were uncovered in the Safari 3 public beta for Windows.

The good news is that Apple was quick to respond in addressing the issues and pushing out a new version of the Safari 3 beta only four days later with version 3.0.1 available to download through the Apple website.

The new version is a recommended update to avoid security risks through using the web browser, but unless you really need the …

Yesterday among a number of other announcements Steve Jobs unveiled the release of the Safari web browser for Windows as a public beta version. The browser had previously only been available for the Mac. If you were one of the likely thousands like me that downloaded the browser to try out on a Windows box, you may want to be careful with it for a little longer.

Within only a few hours, (some within a few minutes) of its release as many as six bugs were found in the browser were found and reported by independent researchers. The flaws included memory corruption errors and denial of service crash’s. All three of the reports were on Windows based versions of the Safari browser, but it was neither confirmed nor denied if these same flaws existed in the …

Shortly after the iPhone was announced questions rose by many about the ability to write 3rd party applications on the OS X platform similar to what is done for the Mac. In a couple of interviews Jobs let us know that OS for the iPhone would not be open to developers to the dismay of many.

Today at the WWDC 2007 Jobs released some information and demonstrations of Apple’s new Leopard OS along with news to developers about the iPhone. Opening up the platform while still maintaining a secure environment has been a challenge for Apple, but they made what Jobs described as a “sweet” compromise. They didn’t open up the OS, but will let developers build applications that run on the Safari web browser engine on the iPhone.

This will allow developers to build web …

Opera Software and Nintendo have finally launched the full version of the Opera web browser for the Internet Channel of the Wii game console. The download is free, but not for long.

This web browser allows Wii owners to browse the internet through the console on their television, provided the console is connected to the internet, of course. Some new features of the full version of the Opera browser revolve around usability with zoom and scrolling functions that were not present in the trial version that was launched in December.

The application allows you to choose from Google or Yahoo for a default search engine, but like any browser you can navigate to any web page and search engine. Navigation is handled through the Wii remote (please be careful), and two remotes can be …

Microsoft has recently announced the release of Deepfish, a web browser for mobile devices that’s still in its early stages. The new browser for smart devices promises to make the experience of browsing web pages closer to that of viewing the pages on a standard desktop browser.

For the most part, browsing the internet on a “smartphone” is cumbersome at best. There are a number of sites that have been developed with scaled down pages targeting mobile devices, but for the vast majority of web sites (including SlipperyBrick) you will need to view it in the full-size which can make it hard to view and navigate.

Toward the end of last year we had news of an Opera web browser that has “Small Screen Rendering” that would “shrink” standard size pages down to be viewed in full on Samsung mobile phones. The …

On January 8th, Tony Chor, Group Program Manager on IEblog wrote that IE 7 had reached 100 million installations, bringing the stats to over 26 percent of all web surfers using Internet Explorer 7 according to WebSideStory with IE 6 not far behind in second place.

The milestone comes only a few months after the release of the browser upgrade, and still seems to be quite a feat despite the fact that IE 7 became a critical update not long after it’s launch. Mozilla’s Firefox, which many believe to be the number 2 browser is continuing to gain popularity but took almost a year to reach the same milestone. Firefox is certainly not going to let IE gain too much ground as they have a new version of Firefox coming soon.

Internet Explorer 7 was launched …

The hardworking writers and editors at SlipperyBrick are definite Firefox fans. However, even we will admit that our favorite web browser could use some tweaks. We were pleased to hear about the new lineup of Firefox features for version 3. We distilled the requirements document from the developer meeting held this week and came up with the most interesting and promising features.

Mandatory

Improve the Add-On user Experience

Simplify Add-on Installation

Ability to install Ad-on in 3 or fewer mouse clicks (nice!)

Add-on configuration from the main Firefox application

Make updates availability more visible

Possibly install Add-ons without a restart (This would be awesome!)

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