As you might have known, the Mozilla foundation is working on improving user retention rates, since they’ve realised that not all people who download Firefox continue to use it. Just 50 percent of the people who download Firefox continue to use it.

They had devised a 12 point plan to improve retention rates, and one among them was to create a first run start page (the default page that opens up when you install and try Firefox).

They’ve made it, and the colourful new start page highlights the most important Firefox features - tabs, search, security and extensions - all that newbies must know.
Live Preview of the new page is here.

Well presented with big buttons, the first run page is a lot better than the old one that came with the previous versions. What do you think? Will this improve Firefox User retention rates? Tell us your thoughts in the comments.

Guest Post by Shankar Ganesh from Technology Blog

After many years of working with windows , i thought that the time has come for me to give Linux a try and experiance what Open Source is all about . As i didnt have any knowledge of Linux Distro’s (so much to choose) , i was really confused about which one to install . So after some talks with my friends , the choice came down Fedora Core 5 and Ubuntu 6.06 . Since FC 5 was available in my college LAN , i decided to go for it .

The installtion was quite simple for a newbie like me . I just created a partition as free space and the setup handled the rest . Even with most of the packages being installed , the installation was simple and took around 40 minutes which was quite ok compared to the Installation of Windows Vista beat 2 which took more than an hour . After installation i was quite amazed to see the beautiful interface of the desktop and the login window , even better than Windows .

The main problem was with the mounting of the NTFS drives and installing softwares . As FC5 doesnt have inbuilt support for NTFS , mp3 , real player etc due to patent issues , it really gave me headache . But thanks to qwerty maniac , i managed to mount my discs and even got mp3 to play and so . For the past 2 days i have been working on it , and i am learning new things every time . Lets see how far can i go ? Would love your recommendations and suggestions for softwares etc .