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Firefox 3 Hits Release Candidate 2

Posted by CmdrTaco on Thu Jun 05, 2008 07:37 AM
from the unleash-the-upgrades dept.
Mozilla The Internet
Barence noted that Firefox has announced release candidate 2 of their highly popular web browser. You can read the release notes while you download. And since my copy just finished downloading, I guess I'll go install it. I hope I don't have any
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Submission: Firefox 3 hits Release Candidate 2 by Barence (1228440)
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  • Actual Release Notes (Score:5, Informative)

    by MankyD (567984) on Thursday June 05 2008, @07:39AM (#23666493) Homepage
    Anyone have the actual RC2 release notes instead of just the Ffx3 general release notes?

      • Re:Actual Release Notes (Score:5, Insightful)

        by GarfBond (565331) on Thursday June 05 2008, @11:57AM (#23670117)
        User-friendly means not inundating the AOL/myspace crowd with bugzilla links and technical jargon. User-friendly means presenting those users with the officially supported release versions instead of the developer targeted nightlies, alphas, betas, or RCs.

        I don't think your perception of user-friendly means what you think it does. Perhaps what you're looking for is "developer-friendly" or "obsessive geek friendly," in which case you might be better off going to http://developer.mozilla.org [mozilla.org]

      • Home page has RC link... (Score:5, Informative)

        by rklrkl (554527) on Thursday June 05 2008, @03:32PM (#23673697) Homepage

        Remember the good-old days when Mozilla (and Firefox) release notes actually talked about bugs fixed, features introduced, and interesting things? When each version actually informed you about what had changed?
        http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/3.0rc2/releasenotes/ [mozilla.com] seems fairly reasonable to me. Granted, the differences between RC1 and RC2 aren't flagged (because virtually nothing but some blocker bugs were the changes between the two), but they *did* flag "Improved in Beta 5" in the equivalent Beta 5 release notes [mozilla.com].

        Going to mozilla.org (or .com) and trying to find betas is now impossible. No, really... there are no links to non-release versions.
        Oh come on! How hard did you bother reading the home page [mozilla.com]? What's New on the right hand side has a "Firefox 3 Sneak Peak" link [mozilla.com] for goodness' sake! And even if you drifted to mozilla.org's home page [mozilla.org] instead, guess what? Developer News on the right hand side announces [mozilla.org] the RC2 release as I speak. You sir, are either one lazy so-and-so or just a total troll!

        I miss the time when Mozilla was a user-friendly organization, when everything was public and *easy to find*.
        I miss the time when people actually made the effort to check the current state of Web sites before slagging them off. Everything related to Mozilla (bar a few closed security bugs, which are opened once the fix is published) is very public and trivially easy to find. It's a shame that some people just don't think before they post.

  • Old Look? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by 0100010001010011 (652467) on Thursday June 05 2008, @07:41AM (#23666523)
    Are there any themes or settings where we can set everything back to the way it was? I'd love to look into the new back end features but I hate the new UI.

    (I'm one of those guys that still has the single close tab in the upper right corner rather than on each tab).

    • Re:Old Look? (Score:5, Informative)

      by Brian Gordon (987471) on Thursday June 05 2008, @07:53AM (#23666629)
      Firefox 2.0 Classic theme [mozilla.org] works great but to use it you have to:
      -Register and log in to Firefox Addons
      -Attempt to override the version check and install the theme
      -Go to your %appdata% just after it fails and look for the temp XPI that it downloaded
      -Copy it to the desktop and extract it with winrar
      -Change the RDF file's <maxversion> to * or 3.0RC2 or something
      -Zip the files back up, normal compression, rename to xpi
      -Drag the file off the desktop into your firefox window to install!

          • Re:Old Look? (Score:5, Funny)

            by Cassius Corodes (1084513) on Thursday June 05 2008, @09:31AM (#23667919)
            If you use the middle mouse button (scroll wheel) on a link it opens it in a new tab - so there one click :)

            ... Unless you are using a mac in which case you are stuck in the mouse stone age

            • Re:Old Look? (Score:5, Interesting)

              by tlhIngan (30335) <slashdot AT worf DOT net> on Thursday June 05 2008, @10:09AM (#23668423)

              If you use the middle mouse button (scroll wheel) on a link it opens it in a new tab - so there one click :) ... Unless you are using a mac in which case you are stuck in the mouse stone age


              Worked fine for me... I just click the scroll wheel on a link and bam, a new tab opens in the background on my Mac. Hey, it works in Safari too... and Opera.

              Don't know what kind of Mac you're using, but they do work great with multibutton mice.

              (And GUI designers can take a note about that - forcing a single button means you can't hide features away in right-click menus. There are literally Windows applications where the right click is used more often than left! Or heck, even Windows Explorer has modifier keys for right click - often Shift- or Alt- right-click can bring up a context menu with more actions [msdn.com].)

  • Retroactively screwed up? (Score:5, Funny)

    by qwertphobia (825473) on Thursday June 05 2008, @07:45AM (#23666555)

    Wow, the update retroactively screwed up the story submission? That's slick!

    I was just thinking, I will have just upgraded by the time I am done reading this po

  • fill in the blanks (Score:5, Funny)

    by jollyreaper (513215) on Thursday June 05 2008, @07:50AM (#23666597)

    I guess I'll go install it. I hope I don't have any
    Taco wants us to complete his post. My suggestions:

    I guess I'll go install it. I hope I don't have any weasels in my trousers.

    I guess I'll go install it. I hope I don't have any eels in my hovercraft.

    I guess I'll go install it. I hope I don't have any embarrassing mistakes visible to the entire world, or at least as much of the world as comes here when bored.

  • Until they bother fixing critical bugs... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Viol8 (599362) on Thursday June 05 2008, @07:55AM (#23666649)
    ..that have been around for years such as this one:

    https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=235853 [mozilla.org]

    Then I won't hold my breath for this release to me any more reliable or stable than any other from the last N years. Its about time they stopped doing a Microsoft and dicking about with "coooo , its so preeetty" UI stuff and bloatware functionalty that no one needs and starting fixing bloody bugs!

    Yeah mod me down fanboys, see if I care, I'm just a user ,what do I know.

    • Re:Until they bother fixing critical bugs... (Score:4, Interesting)

      by slamb (119285) * on Thursday June 05 2008, @11:00AM (#23669239) Homepage
      Argh! Yeah, I hate that bug ("[PAC] Defer proxy resolution for HTTP and HTTPS PAC to avoid blocking main thread during DNS resolution")!

      I wrote a proxy server to run on localhost, do DNS resolution, and send the request to the appropriate upstream proxy or directly to the source, just to work around this bug.

      • Re:Until they bother fixing critical bugs... (Score:4, Interesting)

        by Viol8 (599362) on Thursday June 05 2008, @09:17AM (#23667757)
        Actually "pal" , it is when the bloody app is multi threaded and the whole damn lot hangs including editing windows just because some other page looked up a link that our DNS server choked on. You wait 3 mins for your browser to come back when you're trying to work and see how minor it is to you.

        You a firefox dev by any chance?

  • Who cares! (Score:5, Funny)

    by Kamineko (851857) on Thursday June 05 2008, @07:58AM (#23666667)
    None of us have any, you insensitive clod!

  • Sudden end!?!? (Score:5, Funny)

    by that_itch_kid (1155313) on Thursday June 05 2008, @08:15AM (#23666869)

    I hope I don't have any
    ...any what!?!? Memory leaks!?!? Fried CPUs!!? WHAT!?!? OH GOD, IT'S TAKEN HIM!! IT'S GOING TO KILL US ALL!!!

  • Advertising and the point of RCs (Score:4, Interesting)

    by arctanx (1187415) on Thursday June 05 2008, @08:27AM (#23667049)
    One interesting thing I've found talking to average Joe (who doesn't have any personal agenda to fulfil as to whether they use IE or Firefox) is that they find all this Firefox publicity as vain. The first question they ask me when I point out the download day pledge is "When is it coming out?" to which I reply "When they've ironed out the necessary bugs," which doesn't satisfy them. Their opinion is that spreadfirefox.com shouldn't be trying to line them up for a download until it's good and ready. So I would say to other people who are thinking of spreading the word like I did to perhaps hold off until the thing's actually released. Then people can click and get immediate gratification from the FF3 shininess. Certainly, betas and release candidates are very important for testing purposes and I think the people using them should keep that in mind -- if they're sick of updating their extensions, perhaps they should be running stable. Yes there are regular updates to stable, and yes the issue of having to get updated extensions might be able to be addressed by the development team but it's not going to suddenly appear in an RC, so it's a moot point at this stage.

  • But can it... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by camperdave (969942) on Thursday June 05 2008, @08:28AM (#23667061) Journal
    One of the features I'd like to see in Firefox is the ability to "tear off" a tab into a new window. My surfing experience is something like this [xkcd.com]. It would be nice to be able to right click on a tab, and convert it to a new browser window.
  • Having one hung tab make the others unusable is not cool, in addition ive encountered a few infinite 'yes-no dialogue' loops attacks that force you to either select 'yes', or force quite-- an attack vector that shouldn't have gone past v0.1a IMO.

  • PLUGIN AUTHORS Listen up! (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 05 2008, @08:42AM (#23667259)
    It would be great if the plugin authors would get on the bandwagon and update their own code, so many of us can upgrade to 3.x. Hint hint.

  • Image scaling, finally! (Score:5, Interesting)

    by PhotoGuy (189467) on Thursday June 05 2008, @08:53AM (#23667441) Homepage
    One feature I haven't seen any release notes or anyone else talk about, is true scaling of web pages. It always amazed me that in this day and age, that the Alt-plus and Alt-minus zoom only scaled the text, not the graphics. Not terribly useful for zooming in on a page, or seeing more of a page by zooming out. Opera has had this for ages (from the start?), and it's not as though scaling images is processor intensive (I've written blinding fast C code to do this, with smoothing, myself in the past).

    Glad to see this is finally in Firefox. Hopefully they've fixed a couple of other annoyances I've seen; the random refusal to load pages (that load after a restart, or in other browsers), and the failure of Alt-F search to find things that I can see right in front of me on the page.

    • Re:Firefox is starting to give me the shits (Score:5, Insightful)

      by JustinOpinion (1246824) on Thursday June 05 2008, @08:45AM (#23667307)
      Huh? Are you using the same "Firefox" as me?

      1. What do you mean? Yes, Firefox 3 isn't compatible with (some) Firefox 2 extensions. But then again, Firefox 3 is a whole new version... and it's still at release-candidate level. I've never had extensions break during an incremental upgrade, for instance. (If they become marked as incompatible, that's the fault of the extension author, who should have set compatibility as 2.* or whatever.)

      2. I've never seen that. Normally it just downloads the incremental update and applies it on the next restart.

      3. Well many of us happen to like the new functionality of the combined address-bar/search-bar. However, it's trivial to return to the old-style behavior if that's what you want (e.g. this [mozilla.org]). The same is true of most other changes. Firefox is very customizable.

      4. Sorry to hear that it's unstable on your system. On the systems I use, Firefox 3 has been decidedly more stable than Firefox 2. Faster, too. From various things I've read, it sounds like the typical experience is that Firefox 3 is faster, more stable, and more robust than Firefox 2. But, as always, your mileage may vary.

      5. Huh? When you try to exit, there is a single confirmation box, which can be disabled. It doesn't pop up "a thousand confirmations". Exaggerate much?

      6. Huh? I've never had to re-download extensions when upgrading Firefox (even when installing a whole new version). The only time extensions re-download is when a new version of the extension is available. But... how exactly do you propose to get the new version without downloading it?

      I'm sorry that you seem to be having troubles with Firefox. From what I can tell, this isn't a typical experience. Also, note that you're most welcome to keep using older versions if they suit you better.

    • Re:Firefox is starting to give me the shits (Score:5, Informative)

      by tobiasly (524456) on Thursday June 05 2008, @08:56AM (#23667497) Homepage

      - New versions break older extensions. Until the extension is updated, bye bye extension. I don't enjoy that hassle and it makes me think twice about upgrading.

      What's your solution here? Freeze the extension API forever? It's up to the extension developers, not Mozilla, to make sure they're compatible and mark them so. If you know what you're doing you can bypass this check, but at your own peril.

      New versions force you to use new features without providing functionality to back it out even when the user wants it. Eg. The new supercoolsearchbar garbage. I don't want my browser looking though my bookmarks when I type a URL but I don't mind it searching history that clears itself regularly.

      See, there's this great new search engine called Google.com, and if you go there and type "Firefox 3 disable awesomebar", the very first link describes exactly how to do that. But somehow I get the feeling you'd rather complain about it than actually take it upon yourself to do something about it.

      Firefox is the one application i use regularly that I find myself killing using task manager regularly. It either hangs or hogs memory which is only released by restarting. Don't deny or try to explain in excruciating technical detail why the browser slowly saps all your memory if left on a page that refreshes itself regularly. It's a bug. Deal with it. Fix it. Even refuse to fix it. But stop denying there are memory management issues.

      OK, now it's painfully obvious you're either a troll or haven't been paying attention at all. Every Firefox 3 article I've read since the betas started coming out gushed over how memory management was so much better than in 2, how faster it is, etc. The Mozilla devs publicly discussed in many locations all the work they went through to find and plug memory leaks, prevent circular references in Javascript and extensions from tying up memory, etc.

      Again I'm pretty sure you'd rather just complain than actually read about it but your friend Google will help you find plenty of information on this.

      There's no graceful way to exit that doesn't pop up a thousand confirmations if you do keep the close tab confirmation active.

      I can't even parse this one. You leave the tab-close confirmation on, but don't want it to confirm when you close tabs? Whatever your issue here is, I'm sure there's a setting or extension for it if you'd take 2 minutes to research.

      I can't download and keep my extensions for future install. I really don't like using up bandwidth downloading the same extensions each time I install Firefox.

      Right-click, Save Link As...

      Firefox USE to be a better user experience than IE. I can't say that anymore and it stinks that I can't. I want my Firefox browser back!

      What exactly is it about IE you would like Firefox to emulate?

      And how does drivel like this get modded "Insightful"?!

    • Re:Acid3 (Score:5, Informative)

      by tobiasly (524456) on Thursday June 05 2008, @09:05AM (#23667621) Homepage

      Still only getting 71 on the Acid3 test (your mileage may vary). As this is the RC, that's probably where it'll stick for the foreseeable future.

      Correct, it has been in feature freeze for quite a while and no more changes will be made to the rendering engine.

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