Web Devout tidings

Google, the current leading web search engine, has begun advertising the Firefox web browser on its front page. The ad encourages visitors to download Firefox with the Google toolbar, and currently appears to only be targetting Internet Explorer users.

Google has long been a supporter of Mozilla Firefox, and has employed several Mozilla developers including Ben Goodger, Darin Fisher, Brian Ryner, and Mike Pinkerton to work in Google’s own Firefox development team. They have also developed a number of Firefox extensions and provide a service that pays website owners to specifically advertise Firefox on their websites.

The Google front page receives a tremendous amount of traffic, and the fact that it is currently being used to promote a leading browser in standards compliance is a very good thing for the health of the Web.

Update: Currently, only visitors in the United States are shown the advertisement.

Here is a screenshot of the advertisement:

Update: The advertisement appears to be up or down at different times for different people. If you don’t see it, it may come up for you later.

Internet Explorer 7 Beta 2 is now available for download. The previous release was a preview of this beta. Although the version that was released in March was announced to be “layout complete”, meaning that no significant additional rendering engine changes would be made until the final release, Beta 2 is now considered “feature complete”, meaning the user interface also isn’t expected to receive any more changes.

The official blog post on the release alludes to new changes in “some CSS behaviors”, but none of the public bug reports that I am tracking have yet been marked as fixed. I will retest the support of some of the areas most likely to be addressed once the final version of Internet Explorer 7 is released or if the bug reports’ statuses change.