The share of users still using these two out of date Windows versions is really small, the largest number I saw was maybe .4%? So, if this means that the Mozilla team is able to put out a bigger and better browser, then so be it.  Dotzler says, “Next Tuesday or Wednesday, after Firefox 12 moves to Aurora, the Mozilla Release Engineering team will begin upgrading our Windows build systems to Visual Studio 2010.”

In fact, Mozilla has supported Windows XP SP1 and Windows 2000 longer than Microsoft has. Internet Explorer 8 requires XP with SP2 or higher, and has no support for Windows 2000 at all.  So if you are still using Windows XP, make sure you are running the latest and greatest version if you want to still use Firefox.

I think Google Chrome, Internet Explorer and even Opera should all thank Mozilla and Firefox for continuing to push the bar for innovative browsing. It doesn’t matter who had what feature first.  The thing that does matter is that with all the most recent browser innovations, like the search box or tabbed browsing – Firefox made it cool and useful to do so.

What Mozilla needs to do is find out what the next best feature is going to be.  What can they do that the other browsers can’t?

One more important feature to Firefox’s success is the huge fan base that Mozilla has built. Don’t write Firefox out of the browser wars just yet. I have a feeling that Mozilla will see to it that they stay competitive out there. The browser competition is good for all of us because it means we will get better web browsing experiences – no mater which browser we use.

There is no doubt that both Microsoft and Firefox must be worried about Google’s Chrome browser.  This odd team up only confirms there is a major worry that Google might get a little too powerful.  It will be interesting to watch and see though how this effects Firefox’s default search in the future.  You can only get the Bing powered Firefox on a specific website, and Google is still the default search engine on the version you get from the Mozilla website.

The current Google/Firefox contract runs out in November – so the guys behind Firefox could be using this special version of Firefox to test the waters and see how the public reaction is.  If anything, you can always change your default search engine in Firefox so for knowledgeable users this might be a lot of fuss about nothing.

Mozilla is not out to make money or to have a stake in whatever gets developed there.  All code that is written in the four week period must be open sourced. If you are able to really develop something cool and worth of investing money in, Mozilla may also add additional funding and resources to the project too. 

Overall, Web FWD looks like Mozilla’s offer to the Internet to just make it better – plain and simple.  They want innovative people with amazing ideas to step forward and work with them to bring their ideas to life.  To learn more about the project, be sure to check out webfwd.org.

RecallMoney takes a page from the search engines out there and put together a pretty nice search engine on top the the Firefox history database.  All results are ranked depending on the relevancy of the keyword you search.   Here are a few more details about the extension from the developers:

Then, we added on some other features like filtering by time and the ability to “pin” websites. For example, you remember that article on water was on Quora, so you can pin Quora (by clicking on its domain name) while searching to prioritize its results. RecallMonkey lets you pin up multiple sites at the same time.

You can learn more about RecallMonkey via the Mozilla Labs blog or pick it up for yourself on the Firefox Add-ons website.

Here is a little more about the theme from the designer:

This skin makes Firefox 4 look like Firefox 1.5. Remember the cute skin it was… simply amazing. With this skin, the interface, the tabs, and the download manager were reskinned to look like Firefox 1.5. Useless stuff cluttering the address bar, like the Bookmarks star, the RSS icon and the Go Button have been removed in order to simplify the interface. The ugly green security bar has also been removed.

Personally I think some of the spacing and padding seems to be a ‘bit off, so I can’t use this as my everyday Firefox theme, however I do wish them the best of luck with keeping the old Firefox 1.5 theme alive.

Want to give it a shot? Just head on over to the Firefox Add-ons website to download it or visit realfox.net.

Firefox is bringing in a new test channel (to compliment nightly test builds, the beta version and the final release) called Aurora.  The Aurora channel of updates will deliver features to users at various levels of quality and polish.  This will be the new testing grounds as far as new features and innovations go too.

Overall, introducing this new update channel will both speed up development and give developers better access to get the things done they need to do.  Here is a quick blurb about it from Firefox Release Manager Christian Legnitto:

Lastly, the new repositories (which map to the channels) allow developers to do what they do best—develop. No longer should a developer need to know we are in blocker-only mode for a particular release. Instead, they will be allowed to land their fixes on mozilla-central at any time provided they stick to the mozilla-central tree rules. The mozilla-aurora repository will have different rules, and mozilla-beta will have different (and stricter) rules still. The rules for each of these repositories will not change over time or from release to release, which should help alleviate a lot of developer confusion and annoyance

For more information on the new development channels for Firefox 4 and beyond, be sure to check out this fantastic post by Christian in the Mozilla Developer Center.

Going by the official Firefox 4 download stats, it appears in the first 24 hours Firefox 4 was available it was downloaded over 5,000,000 times.  That is pretty impressive.

Leave your thoughts on what you think about Firefox 4 in the comments or join the discussion on the Firefox Facts Facebook Fan Page!

Firefox 4 has suffered some setbacks as far as an official launch goes, but I think the public at large will be happy with the fact that they took a little ‘bit of extra time to work all the major bugs out.  Firefox 4 will also mark the last big release cycle Mozilla will do with the browser, so we may not have long drawn out countdowns any longer.  The reason for this is that the Mozilla team is opting for smaller and quicker releases, such as Google Chrome and other browsers like it have been doing.

When Firefox 3 came out, it had a record setting 8 million unique downloads the day it was released, back in 2008.  Will Firefox 4 be able to come close to that number? I guess we will see tomorrow!

* – image above from the Mozilla Firefox 4 t-shirt design contest.

So, what is the magic going on behind this add-on? Start Faster bypasses the Windows prefetch feature to get Firefox up and running faster.  When running Firefox on Windows, the default way of doing things is to call several things up at the operating system level (such as DLL libraries). Since these are not 100% needed, all the Start Faster add-on has to do is ignore this step of the start up process.

A “Faster Firefox” shortcut is added to your desktop to start launching Firefox with this idea in mind, after you install the add-on.  So, if you want to go back to starting the old fashion way – you can do so via your regular shortcut icon. Overall you should see your Firefox start up time be about two times faster than without.

You can pick up the Start Faster add-on for Firefox 4 from the Firefox Add-ons website.