03/12/2007 by swordfish.

Firefox currently has a staggering 125 million global users, according to figures released by a Mozilla executive.

The figure comes courtesy of John Lilly, Mozilla’s Chief Operating Officer, who arrives at the result by analysing the statistical data collected through the browser’s update service.

As explained on Lilly’s blog, Firefox pings the update servers every day to check for patches and new versions, and by counting those pings he says it is possible for Mozilla to make a rough guess at how many instances of the browser are running.

He labels these Active Daily Users (ADU), and says that taken as an average over seven days, the number of ADUs has skyrocketed from 23 million in October 2006 to 48 million in November.

Source: PC Pro

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03/12/2007 by swordfish.

Facebook has modified its Beacon advertising programme which revealed what members were purchasing from e-commerce sites.

Beacon was used in conjunction with around 40 sites, including eBay and Sony, and posts details of users’ purchases on their Facebook news board.

Users could click on a Beacon box on Facebook if they wanted to keep their purchases secret, but in many cases the box disappeared after 20 seconds and consent was assumed to have been given.

This aroused the anger of campaign groups like MoveOn.org, which organised a Facebook group with over 59,000 members protesting against the system.

Facebook has now said that users will have to opt-in to the system in the future.

“Facebook deserves credit for taking a huge step in the right direction,” said MoveOn.org spokesman Adam Green.

Source: Yahoo News

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