The Proliferation of Linux

Google has announced that they will be launching an open source web browser of their own. Google Chrome, as it will be known should be, according to the official Google Blog available for download some time today (Tuesday, 02.09.2008).

Funnily enough, Google Chrome was revealed to the world when Google by mistake sent some comic books detailing the browser ahead of time to a few blogs and tech sites. And yes, they really revealed their browser in a comic book.

The new browser takes elements from both Firefox and WebKit and is fully open source.

According to the Mozilla Foundation’s John Lilly, the new Google browser will not affect Firefox’s relationship with Google.

• Google Blog
• Google Chrome comic book

An anonymous reader at Slashdot points out an interesting interview with Mozilla’s “evangelist”, Christopher Blizzard.

It’s sort of interesting though, part of our strategy is to make sure, that we continue making change and the indirect effect of this is that Microsoft continues to have to do releases, because if we get so far ahead that we’re able to drive the platform they are not able to keep up and keep their users. I mean, we have this joke which says “Internet Explorer 7 is the best release we ever did”, because they would not have done it, if we would have not built Firefox.

And the same is true for Apple, they are doing a lot to keep up with us. Safari 3.1 is a good example, as far as we see it, the only reason they did this release was that Firefox 3 would come out and have Javascript speed which would be twice as fast as theirs, cause that’s how it was before.

derStandard.at [via Slashdot]

Well, not quite.  75% of my visitors using Firefox use Firefox 3.0.  Overall, 60% of my visitors use Firefox.  The statistics are:

1. Firefox (60%)
2. Internet Explorer (27%)
3. Safari (8%)
4. Opera (5%)

And the Firefox versions?

Mozilla has now confirmed that Firefox 3.0 will be officially available on June 17th 2008.

“After more than 34 months of active development, and with the contributions of thousands, we’re proud to announce that we’re ready,” the message says. “It is our expectation to ship Firefox 3 this upcoming Tuesday, June 17th.”

Firefox 3.0rc3 has also been made available and it should be the last release candidate released before June 17th.  Only a really serious, unexpected, “show-stopper bug” would change the release date.

• Firefox 3.0rc3 download
• Release notes

mozillaZine [via ZDnet]

With this latest release, Firefox 3.0 inches towards a final version.  Don’t expect this to have any new features, rather look for better stability and bug fixes.

• Release notes
• Download

Mozilla [via Download Squad]