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According to an article on Mozilla Links, Firefox takes 28% market share in Europe. Hungary showed the greatest growth in market share, while Slovenia is the European country with the greatest market share support for Firefox.

This report comes as Firefox 3 is in its sixth alpha version. Firefox 3 will have a number of new features and refinements, including support for “contentEditable” fields, better memory management, text zoom memory, native ogg audio/video support, and many other features.

Feed free to find out more about Firefox, including the ability to download Firefox with the Google Toolbar.

I was reading various blogs this evening, and I saw that Google has released version 3 of their toolbar for Firefox.  I immediately thought, “Cool.”  So I went to my extensions menu in Firefox and selected “Find updates.”  Nothing happened.  I expected it to come back to me and say that there were some new updates available, but nope.  Not for any of my extensions which is kind of weird.  Maybe it is because I’m using a Mac.

Update: About 10 minutes later, I’m re-reading this, and I realize that I could have actually read the Google blog post.  They released the version 3 beta of the toolbar. That would certainly explain why it isn’t automatically updating in Firefox.  I guess I got over excited about it and posted before thinking.  How embarrassing.

So my main blog at http://jacob.peargrove.com/blog now seems to have a Google pagerank of 5. Google gives each page in its index a score from 0 to 10 depending on many different things. For a personal blog to be given a pagerank of 5 is pretty significant. Ever since I’ve been checking the pagerank of my site with the Firefox Google Toolbar it has been at PR-4. Having a higher pagerank might also explain the increased amount of traffic I’ve been seeing to my site. October (already, so far) as seen more unique visitors than any previous month.

Although Firefox 2 isn’t officially released from Mozilla until tomorrow (Oct 23, 2006), I found that the files are on the FTP server ready to be downloaded. Of course there is an official list of changes, but here is a list of small little things I’ve noticed. (continue reading…)

Quick answer to the title: you can’t.

One of the search queries on my other blog was: firefox how to keep ip address off internet. I thought I would help this person out and explain things to them.

When you load up a web page, Firefox (or any Internet browser) sends a request to a web server that in English might say, “Please send the contents of this page http://example.com/ back to me at address 10.1.2.3.” The web server receives this request and sends the contents of the page back to Firefox at the provided address where it is displayed to the user. This makes it really difficult to download web pages while not revealing your IP (Internet Protocol) address to others.

There are ways by using a proxy so that your address doesn’t go all the way to the end web server. In this way, your browser sends the request to the proxy, and the proxy creates its own request to the web server. The web server sends the page contents to the proxy, and the proxy forwards the contents back to your Firefox browser as a response to your original request.

There is this proxy service out there called the Anonymizer which does this sort of thing. I believe they charge money for their service, but you might be able to find a similar service out there. I do not endorse or recommend any products, I’m only stating here that they exist.

Firefox however, is a browser that is designed to be more secure and keep your information more private. You can download it by clicking here.