The Firefox team have started a marketing campaign with the initial aim to get a million downloads of Firefox in ten days. They are only two days into the campaign and are over half-way there! That’s perhaps not too surprising given the recent constant security scares about Internet Explorer.
Their cause must also have been bolstered by the recent spate of high profile stories recommending non-IE browsers in such places as USA Today and US-CERT‘s recomendation to “Use a different web browser”.
In the meantime in case you haven’t tried it Get Firefox!
Once you’ve tried it and like it, sign up to become an affiliate. The campaign site is at http://www.spreadfirefox.com.

Update: It looks like the spreadfirefox server can’t take the strain. Mozilla’s Firefox page is fine, you can download direct from there.

I got an invitation to join Gmail the other day (thanks Sara). Of course, I decided to take a look. So far I’m quite impressed! In order to test it without too much risk I have set two of my email accounts to forward to my Gmail account. That way I get a decent amount of email to play with.
I’m very impressed with the interface. I like the fact that so much is done on the client side. It makes things very slick without having to round trip to the server all the time. Strangely, I have been thinking about fat web clients recently. I’ve been thinking that quite often you really don’t want to take that round trip to the server to process a single click. I think I really want an opportunity to play with the the wonderful 204 HTTP response code so that the server can still know state changes.
Anyway, back to Gmail. I think that the labels are a great idea. Much better than folders, though I worry about the stuff I don’t label but which I do archive. I can no longer see it, other than in ‘All Mail’. Of course I can search for it, but I can’t really browse it. Unless I’m missing something? I like the ‘conversation’ view. It seems slightly more intuitive than Mozilla Mail’s (and every one else’s) tree structure for threaded emails.
I like the fact that it knows to apply the same labels to all mails in the same thread. That helps to compensate for the paltry 20 filters. I hope they increase that number soon. In Mozilla Mail I have 36 filters set up just for the two mail boxes I am echoing to Gmail. There are more in my other accounts!
Of course, I love the fact that they have so many access keys set up. Far less mousing around allows me to work quicker!
There are lots of things I need it to do before I could consider it a suitable replacemement for a decent fat mail client like Mozilla Mail. For instance, I need to be able to set lots of different from/reply addresses without having to edit preferences each time. I need more rules like ‘BCC to <email address>’ automatically, or request receipt, I need to be able to sort my mails! And backup! I must have backup. And import; the tools knocking about the web at the moment are no good for me as I must preserve dates, and folders. Mind you, one gigabyte wouldn’t be enough if I were to import all my email archives!
I think I like the way it deals with spam. I’ve noticed that it catches a lot and filters it to the spam folder, but I like it less that it’s silent about it. That is, I see no indication that I have spam to check through for false positives. I also noticed that it bounces some spam.

Still, first impressions are favourable so far.