2 Million IE8 Beta 1 vs. Firefox 3.0

Firefox 3.0 RC2 just around the corner

By Marius Oiaga, Technology News Editor

June 5, Softpedia

Firefox 3.0 will not even trip on the approximately two million copies of Internet Explorer 8 Beta 1 that Microsoft revealed as having been downloaded since the browser was introduced on March 5, 2008. After Microsoft Chairman
Bill Gates pointed to August for the release of Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2, Tony Chor, IE Group Program Manager, informed that the Redmond company accounted for more than two million downloads of Beta 1 over the past three months. But in this context, with the final version of IE8 not even on the horizon, judging strictly from an evolutionary perspective, there is nothing standing between Firefox 3.0 and the world wide web.

"On behalf of the team, I’d like to thank you all for your help with beta 1. Since we released Beta 1 in March we’ve had over two million downloads so far with lots of good, useful feedback. We’ve been listening to that feedback and making improvements to our work on an interoperable platform that has full CSS 2.1 support, faster script performance, and significantly more capable developer tools as well as our cool new features like Activities and Web Slices. We’ve learned a lot from this first," Chor stated.

Microsoft plans IE8 Beta 2 for August, but Firefox will drop by mid-June, with the Release Candidate 2 build of the open source browser just around the corner, Mozilla focusing on delivering it ahead of May 6. Firefox 3.0 is aiming straight for the record books attempting to become the most downloaded piece of software in the first 24 hours since the launch, an initiative spearheaded by the Download Day website. Mozilla is reportedly looking for no less than five million downloads of Firefox 3.0 in the first day following the official release.

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image by microsoft