Working together for standards The Web Standards Project

25 million downloads is a very respectable figure by anyone’s standards, and standards are what we know and love here. That’s the figure for Firefox downloads since version 1.0 was released 99 days ago, and Spreadfirefox is celebrating/commemorating the milestone with some very limited edition Firefox coins.

Personally, I’m over the moon that the browser has taken off as well as it has, and every day I find myself extolling its virtues to colleagues and friends, whether it be the oh-so-easy-to-find bookmarks (Command + B, type a few letters and hey presto, my bookmark revealed) or the ability to save groups of pages as my home page (or pages). I’ve convinced a number of people around me to switch, and most of them do so permanently (only resorting to IE if they really have to, as in they are using a site that has not been built to standards), and I’ll continue to preach on that topic.

Microsoft may well have done a U-turn on its policy of not releasing a standalone version of IE because it’s worried about the popularity of Firefox, but we’ll probably never know for sure. I’m interested to see just what does get released from MS stable, although I’m tempted to say that whatever they release I won’t be switching back. Or will I?

I have moved to Firefox probably for the same reasons as most people, namely the tabbed browsing, the pop-up blocking, the general perception that it’s more secure and its customization options. Oh, and there’s the small matter of it supporting web standards far better than IE currently does. But what if Microsoft finally put things right on that front? What if they sorted out the now very dated-looking interface and gave us tabbed browsing? What if they offered everything that Firefox does and then some? Well, I think that’s the challenge for the Redmond team now, because if it’s anything less than that, I’ll be sticking with the fox. In the meantime, roll on 50 million downloads, I say.

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