<![CDATA[VR16 News Feed]]> <![CDATA[Firefox Hits 400 Million Downloads]]> The popular open-source browser Firefox has been downloaded more then 400 million times. From its launch in 2004, it took one year to reach 100 million downloads. A year later, it hit 200 million downloads.

The Firefox team thanked users for helping to achieve the latest download figures with this message posted on Firefox Web site: "With your amazing efforts, Firefox has reached 400 million downloads and demonstrated that not even the world's most powerful companies can keep people from a better, safer, and faster Web experience."

It is difficult to judge the exact share of the browser market enjoyed by Firefox. The most recent statistics published by W3Counter suggest that Firefox holds a quarter of the market, but most other organizations releasing such statistics suggest a slightly lower figure.

According to figures released by US consultancy firm Janco and the IT Productivity Center, Firefox currently has 17.4 percent of the browser market — up 5.6 percentage points in the last year. Also within the last year, Microsoft's Internet Explorer browser dropped 9.6 percentage points to a market share of 63.9 percent.

]]> <![CDATA[Google white screen uses more energy]]> If Google had a black screen 3000 megawatt-hours per year of energy would be saved. That is the conclusion arrived at by the creators of the website Blackle, a clone of Google which uses a black background instead of white.

An all white webpage, such as Google, uses about 74 watts to display on a CRT screen (non flat/lcd), while an all black page uses only 59 watts. Google gets about 200 million queries a day. Assuming each query is displayed for 10 seconds, that means Google is running for about 550,000 hours every day on some desktop. If using a black background will save a total of 15 (74-59) watts, then that’s a global savings of 8.3 Megawatt-hours per day, or about 3000 Megawatt-hours a year. Now take into account that about 25 percent of the monitors in the world are CRTs, and at 5 pence a kilowatt-hour, that's £150,000, a goodly amount of energy and money for changing a few color codes.

]]> <![CDATA[Phishing still a problem]]> What is Phishing?
"Phishing attacks" use emails and spoof websites to fool users into divulging thier personal details such as banking and identity information.

Despite efforts by many anti-fraud groups Phishing is still causing problems. April 2007 saw the highest number of Phishing sites on the internet, although targeteted campaigns have succeeded in forcing criminals to take these sites offline quicker than ever before.

See antiphishing.org for more details

]]> <![CDATA[Online Retail Sales up 4.8%]]> The recently published Retail Sales Index from the Office Of National Statistics shows that non-food retail has grown by 1.2% in the last three months and that e-commerce and mailorder retail has grown by a massive 4.8% in the last three months over the same period last year.

]]> <![CDATA[Firefox Wipes Out Serious Threats]]> Mozilla fixed multiple vulnerabilities in Firefox. The new version fixes security problems such as cross-site scripting, spoofing, exposure of sensitive information and system access.

Mozilla Foundation advises users to update to the latest version of its browser. Firefox 2 users can upgrade to version 2.0.0.2 and Firefox 1.5 users are advised to upgrade to 1.5.0.10. Users of the SeaMonkey also need to update to version 1.0.8 because of similar problems.

]]> <![CDATA[Vista Worse For User Efficiency Than XP]]> Despite Microsoft’s efforts to provide for a more fluid and agreeable interface with Vista’s Aero, Pfeiffer Consulting found Vista to be even worse than Windows XP (SP2) --and of course Mac OS X.

Pfeiffer Consulting advises to think very carefully before migrating or upgrading to Windows Vista in the creative department. Their benchmarks show that creative professionals will actually become less productive than they would be when using Windows XP.

]]> <![CDATA[Firefox 3.0 opens door to Web apps]]> When Firefox 3.0 is released later this year, the open-source browser is likely to contain an impressive collection of new features, including offline support for Web applications and new bookmark and search features.

While the final feature set hasn't been determined, Firefox 3.0 will also contain elements for its 4.0 release and beyond, Mozilla says.

Firefox 3.0 is due out in the second half of the year.

]]> <![CDATA[Adobe launches Apollo Alpha for labs]]> Mike Chambers has shed new light on the progress of Apollo. The team is working hard to release a public aplha on labs.

The first labs release will be targeted at Flex developers. HTML developers will be able to start building applications, but we won't have HTML focused docs, and some of the HTML specific features are not as far along as some of the other features, Mike says. The second labs release in the summer will be targeted at HTML developers.

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