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Mozilla Firefox 3 Launched in Gujarati & Punjabi - Hindi nowhere to be seen!
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Mozilla Firefox is finally all set to touch the milestone it had set out for, a Guiness Book of World Record for most number of downloads in 24 hours. Starting on June 17, 2008 (10AM Pacific Time), over 17 millions of downloads have been clocked, till date. According to Mozilla, the folks at the Guiness Book are still reviewing the attempt. However, record or no record, Mozilla Firefox is now all set to get head to head with Internet Explorer. Although Firefox had always been termed as the black horse, we can now safely count the browser as a major competitor to IE. 
Let’s crunch a few numbers, here. Back in 2005, when Firefox had first been launched, Internet Explorer had commanded a sizeable portion of 70% of eyeballs while Firefox was being used by one-fourth of the Internet users, mostly thanks to the existing followers of Mozilla & Netscape. Zoom in to the May of 2008 and IE now resides in 53% of internet users’ machine whereas Firefoxhas enjoys a share of 40%. If you look at the table (source : w3schools) given alongside, most of the IE users have been shifting to IE7, thanks to the tabbed browsing feature brought in by Microsoft after ages since this feature was first launched in the market. Other reasons being the ability of using “addons” that go a long way in improving the useability of a browser.
(Click on the table for a more comprehensive comparison)
All being said, it was very important for Mozilla to develop Firefox in localized languages, in order to increase its reach. Thanks to the open source code and huge number of developers, who are Firefox enthusiasts, it didn’t take long to come up 
with almost 50 localized versions. However, what surprised us all is that Mozilla is offering Firefox in Gujarati and Punjabi but no Hindi is yet available. It seems Gujarati and Punjabi are more popular in the international arena. Although a spokesperson from Firefox, Chris Hoffman, said “They (Gujarati and Punjabi) were not given any preference. As a free software project, anyone can access our source code and localize it in the language they choose. We have active community members working on Hindi and Tamil”, I am still a bit wary about Hindi’s exclusion.
Anyway, we at WATBlog did our bit to help Firefox attain the World Record. Did you?
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I cant believe that they are approaching 18 million downloads already. Thats incredible!