Daily Debrief: Looking forward to Firefox 3 Video

Daily Debrief: Looking forward to Firefox 3 Video Transcript

[ Music ] ^M00:00:02

>> I'm Kara Tsuboi, CNET News.com. Welcome to the Daily Debrief. Editor of CNET Webware.com Rafe Needleman is here to talk about Firefox 3 that will be released next Tuesday.

>> Tuesday.

>> What kind of changes can we expect to see with this?

>> Well, hopefully it's gonna be faster. Everything that we've been seeing with this, it's faster, it's more stable, it's more reliable, and there's really cool new features. The address bar is replaced by something called internally the "awesome bar." And what it does is it knows what you've visited, what's in your bookmarks and the frequency that you go to these places and when you start typing something, it gives you a list, it auto-fills a list. And it's really spookily good. I mean, after a while, you'll just stop typing URLs. Not everybody likes it, some people think it's a little intrusive, a little too much information, but I've been using it and the released kind of Firefox I think it really makes browsing a lot faster.

>> That's exciting it might...

>> Yeah.

>> Right now, Firefox hold -- what about 20% of the market share.

>> Yes.

>> And it's second to Internet Explorer of Microsoft.

>> Yeah.

>> Obviously this third edition is to ramp up their users, I'm sure.

>> Right and there's a big push there, the Mozilla organization, which Firefox is built under.

>> Yeah.

>> Is hosting or trying to get a million downloads in one day. And a little known thing, normally, you wouldn't wanna do this, right because you know, you burn up the wires, you got to pay for that bandwidth and it will make it an unsatisfactory experience. People don't know this, but the Firefox downloads and all the back-end stuff where Firefox is talking to service, that's all hosted by Google. Google is supplying Firefox all its bandwidth and they got it to burn, so Firefox and go and say, hey, everybody come on board and we'll see if we can break a million downloads in one day.

>> Yeah exactly. Get into the Guinness Book of World Records with that.

>> I guess for what it's worth.

>> Yeah exactly.

>> Yeah, yeah.

>> Now tell me why is Firefox so popular. What is it such a big deal and how do they catch on so fast.

>> Well, a couple of things happen. First of all, it's not Microsoft, so there's the not -- we're not the man-thing. It's open source, so it's developed and integrated much more quickly than Microsoft IE, which is, you know, done by a copyright of developers inside Microsoft. So everybody contributes to Firefox, to Mozilla and that goes into Firefox. When it first came out, it was more secure, both because it was newer, not everybody was trying to hack it in. Secondly, because it was open source, there are more people writing security, more people writing things that were protective of it. And also, they introduced some features. Tab to browsing was in IE first. It was first in other browsers, like Firefox and that is a fundamental change in the way, you know an intermediate or advanced user uses the Web, so they can have always Windows open at once and that was first in Firefox.

>> I couldn't live without that.

>> Yeah, likewise.

>> Yeah.

>> So those kinds of innovations keep things going. Firefox also had and has now still a very well-developed environment for plug-ins, for ad-ons to the browser. Again, that's possible in IE, but you don't have the development support for plug-ins that you do in Firefox, so you can, you know add in a Delicious plug-in or a viewers or this or that I can't even remember them right now, but there are a lot of really interesting ways to extend the Firefox experience.

>> Very quickly, do you use Firefox?

>> I do. I've been using it since first release candidate, which is a couple of weeks ago, yeah.

>> And do you think they're gonna get a million downloads on Tuesday?

>> It's possible.

>> It's very possible.

>> And you know, it's a good browser. Use it, seriously. It's awesome, give it a try.

>> Great and we will be checking it with Webware.com to see if they can hit that million mark on Tuesday.

>> Yeah, we'll be tracking it.

>> Alright. Thank you Rafe Needleman, CNET's Webware.com.

>> Thank you.

>> I'm Kara Tsuboi, News.com. This has been the Daily Debrief. We'll see you next time. ^M00:03:34 [ Music ]