Firefox 4 Officially Released, Crosses One Million Downloads Within Hours

After a dozen betas, and two release candidates, Mozilla has finally released the public build of Firefox 4. It took nearly a year to come, but now that it’s here, expect it to break all records. With well over five thousand downloads per minute, at the moment, Firefox seems well poised to go past the ten million mark. You can tack Firefox 4 downloads in realtime from glow.mozilla.org.



Although, several planned features were dropped from Firefox 4, as it struggled to stay on schedule, Firefox 4 is a meaty update, which boasts of some pretty significant enhancements.

The user interface has been refined to give the website higher priority. Tabs are now on top (as they should be), and the menu bar has been replaced with a single “Firefox” button.

Firefox 4 is significantly faster than its predecessors, courtesy of the new JagerMonkey JavaScript engine, and should be able to hold its own against the likes of Opera 11, Chrome 10 and Internet Explorer 9. Also new to this build is hardware (GPU) acceleration and WebGL support. Unfortunately, hardware acceleration is currently not supported in Linux. WebGL compatibility means that Firefox is ready to meet the demands of the new age, graphics intensive web-applications and games.

Other new features in Firefox 4 include in-built synchronization option, “Panaroma” tab organization, app tabs, multi-touch support, DNT (Do Not Track) header support, WebM video playback, crash protection for popular plug-ins (Flash, QuickTime, Silverlight etc.), HTML 5 parser, and open type fonts support. The full changelog for Firefox 4 is available here.

Firefox 4 for Windows, Mac and Linux is available in more than seventy languages from firefox.com.

Best Mobile Apps Of The Week for Android And iOS

Welcome to the eighth edition of Best Mobile Apps of the Week for Android and iOS. Starting this week, I am going to list two apps each for Android and the iOS platform. Sadly, I will not introduce our readers to new Symbian apps from this week as well.

In this edition of BMATW, Android owners will be introduced to an app which will monitor their sleeping habits and an app which will help users create their own Android avatar! For iOS owners, there is a very popular Hindi news channel application and a RSS reader app.

Sleep As An Droid (Android)

Ignoring the grammatically incorrect title of the app, Sleep as an Droid helps a user to track his sleeping habit.

Track your sleep and wake up gently with nature sounds in optimal sleep phase

Alarm clock with sleep cycle tracker. Wakes you gently in light sleep for pleasant mornings. Features: sleep graph history, sleep debt stats, sharing (FaceBook, email), nature alarms (birds, sea, storm…) with gradual volume up, music volume down when asleep, captcha, sleep talk/snoring recording.

The app uses the inbuilt accelerometer of your Android handset to track your movement while sleeping, and wakes you up when you are in a ‘light sleep’. Users can also set mathematical puzzles as captcha codes, so as to completely wake them up from sleep!

Sleep As An Droid can be downloaded for free (2 weeks trial version) from the Android Market.

Androidify (Android)

Androidify was released by Google a couple of weeks ago on the Android Market. The app allows a user to create their own ‘Android’ flavored avatar just for fun! Users can customize each and every aspect of their Android avatar including its height, width, clothes and hairstyle etc.

Androidify yourself by customizing the little green Android as yourself, your family, your friends, anyone! Stretch it , shrink it, add a hoody, style its hair, throw on some shades, or even give it a parrot and a pirate hat. Arrrgh!

Once you’ve personalized your Android, share it with your friends, set it as a photo in your contact book, or use it in some inventive way we haven’t thought of yet. Have fun, and we can’t wait to see what you come up with!

Sadly, the application does not allow users to create an animated avatar which is a letdown. Hopefully, Google will introduce this feature in a future update. Android users can download Androidify for free from here.

Reeder (iOS)

Reeder is one of the most successful RSS reader apps available for the iOS platform. The app has a very slick UI and with some nice and smooth transitions. Reeder supports syncing with Google Reader and allows users to browse their feeds either via feed or folders.

Users also have the option to share a given piece of news with their friends on popular social networking sites like Twitter and Facebook.

Reeder also supports Instapaper, ReaditLater, Readibility, state saving and Image caching. The app is available for the iPhone as well as for the iPad. The mobile version of Reeder costs $2.99, while the tablet version costs $4.99.

NDTV (iOS)

The NDTV app for iOS brings the latest news and videos from the NDTV newsroom to the users. The app also allows users to watch the live stream of some popular NDTV channels including NDTV India and NDTV Profit. The video streaming works on Wi-Fi as well as on 3G/EDGE.

The NDTV Social section allows users to read and know more about the NDTV anchors and news reporters. The app is available as a free download for the iPhone as well as for the iPad.

Facebook Brings More features to The “Like” Button

Facebook is all set to change the way users share content and links using the “Like” and “Share” buttons. The sharing functionality of Facebook’s like button has been slightly overhauled which might trigger a retiring door for Facebook’s share button.

Before this update, the “Like” button was kind of a recommendation while the share button was “Sharing” in it’s true sense. Liking a webpage would post a mini update on your Facebook profile while sharing a webpage would bring additional details e.g thumbnails, excerpt, personal comments and so on.

The newer update rolled by Facebook changes how the “Liked” story is shared on your Facebook profile or news feed. Unlike before, a thumbnail and excerpt is returned, an example is shown below:

The next major update is that now users can “Like” updates within a Facebook application. You can “Like” and share content or updates from an application which your friend is using, hence expect some heavyweight Facebook liking cluttering up your News feed, “Mr X likes your daily horoscope” and stuff like that.

Why Facebook’s Share Button Shouldn’t Retire

There is a major difference between Facebook’s share and like buttons. It’s “personal commentary”.

When you are sharing a webpage using the “Share” button, you have the ability to add a personal note or comment to the update. Whether you hate the page, whether it’s funny, you can express it. But such is not the case with Facebook’s like button. The moment you hit “Like” it’s dumped to your profile, no second chance at all.

You can always post a comment to the “Liked” story and express your views but this is kind of boring for two reasons. First, you have to open your Facebook profile and then comment on the “Liked” link. Second, your close friends might get annoyed when you keep liking and commenting on the same link over and over again.

For Facebook, The Like Button Makes More Sense

But if you think from Facebook shoes, pushing the “Like” button makes perfect sense for two reasons.

First, content sharing is much more rapid, instantaneous and lucid. No popups or any other confirmation as such, all the user needs to do is hit the “Like” button on any website, blog, app and the page is shared instantly on his news feed.* Second, the “Like” button is much easier to implement and has a powerful branding attached to it. “Hey I have 12K Likes on my Facebook page while you have only 4K”, you get the idea.

Facebook Spokeswoman Malorie Lucich told Mashable that they will continue to support the Share button, Like is the “recommended solution moving forward.”

What’s your take on the newer features of Facebook’s “Like” button? Do you think it’s useful enough and worth ditching the share button from your website ?

Related: Check out Techie Buzz’s Facebook app