In less than 24 hours, the latest release of Firefox has been downloaded more than 8 million (8000,000) times.

So far the reviews have all been positive, and while many themes and extensions are not yet available for 3, many have already been ported over and more are available every day. Additionally the default theme for Firefox 3 is much more eye catching than the corporate looking (read: boring) theme of Firefox 2.

Testing here at HTMLfixit.com over the release candidates and the final release show it to be an order of magnitude faster than Firefox 2 to load and to render, even on sub standard computers. It also doesn’t significantly increase it’s memory use over time as Firefox 2 did. The list of new and improved features is as long as your arm and has been detailed on dozens of sites so I won’t go into it here.

Interestingly Firefox 3 already accounts for nearly 10 percent of HTMLfixIT’s traffic, which goes to show that a good many of our techie visitors already know about it.

In a move that has many people shaking their heads in wonder, Ebay are about to make offering Paypal payments on auctions compulsory in Australia. The ACCC has indicated they may well take action over it, but Ebay then issued a statement to their users that they are going to push ahead anyway and only delayed the action for a month because of the ACCC statement (Which said essentially that they think the action to potentially be anti-competitive.)

Ebay claims that the measure is for user security, but were that true and they really wanted to “help” users, they’d want to lower the price of Paypal transactions related to Ebay auctions so they are not double dipping on the fee charges, (ie getting paid for the auction listing, and then again to accept payment for it.)

They have not done this and as a result people are leaving Ebay in droves from the message boards we’ve read. Ebay perhaps consider Australia a good test market because in the grand scheme of things they haven’t really lost much if it falls apart because of this, or perhaps they think the extra payment money will make up for the drop in sellers and consumers. Who knows?

One thing that is for certain. The recent opening of the Tradingpost could not have been timed better. Telstra/Sensis must be absolutely delighted to discover Ebay driving business their way.

If Ebay had instead specified that payments could only be accepted by any method that can be easily reversed or by systems with similar security constraints to Paypal, it would probably have happened without ACCC interference. I find myself somewhat surprised that they did not expect the fuss that has resulted to be honest.

It’s been about 5 years since I released the first advx counter, so much has happened in my life that I had a hard time making room for the next version of the counter, but I finally got there.

There is a ton of new stuff in this release candidate, the following are just a few:

– Up to date browser and OS detection.
– Significant bug fixes and improvements throughout.
– Navigation changes include first/last/next/previous links when displaying large
volumes of stats rather than displaying all in one page.
– Search engine bot detection.
– Non JavaScript browser detection.
– Much better file locking and error reporting routines.
– Display collected URL strings encoded to stop XSS problems.
– Detailed displays are in alternating colour codes to aid readability.
– Updated country of origin library.
– Aided install. The script can check all of its required files locations and permissions and report problems.

This is a release candidate, but it is a fairly stable one as it’s been running endlessly behind htmlfixit.com for over a year.
Please try the newly upgraded demo to see what’s different. (Keep in mind that the actual statistics displayed in the demo are fake and fairly old except for a couple I added to show Firefox 3 and vista/ie8.)

Those of you with the current ADVX counter, can upgrade to the new RC just by overwriting the old files with the new. This
upgrade is of no use to people without the old ADVX counter because the upgrade doesn’t come with the configuration files
required to get it working. (you use your old ones unchanged)

The new advx counter 2.00 upgrade can be downloaded here. and the instructions are included in the zip file.

Anyone wishing to report an error or bug, please use the forum listed in the menu to the left. Assuming nobody finds any show stoppers, this release candidate will become the final 2.00 version in a week or two.