Firefox 3 Release On Tuesday

unkgoon writes "The Mozilla Developer News blog is reporting Firefox 3 will be released on Tuesday, June 17, 2008, and you're invited to the party! From the website: 'After more than 34 months of active development, and with the contributions of thousands, we're proud to announce that we're ready. It is our expectation to ship Firefox 3 this upcoming Tuesday, June 17th. Put on your party hats and get ready to download Firefox 3 — the best web browser, period.'" Update: 06/12 17:44 GMT by T : Dan100 was among several readers to write with news that, rather than just being announced, "Opera 9.5 has been released today after nearly two years of development. New features include increased speed (particularly in the Javascript engine), Opera Link (browser synchronisation), and a 'sharp' new theme." Dan100 also links to a full changelog from 9.27.

Zoom

[Frosty Piss]

I've been using the RC, and must say the memory issues that the Mozilla developers have tried to claim never existed, are almost nonexistent now. The only tiny thing I don't like is the Text Size function which is now called "zoom", and is sucky.

What about the fsync problem?

[Spy der Mann]

Will it be fixed in 3.0, or will I have to wait for 3.1? See, I use Linux and my partitions are ext3. The fsync issue affects me.

Re:Zoom

[Richard_at_work]

I just wish there was a way to revert the 'Awesome Bar' to the standard address bar that FF2 had (with no automatic searching, just url matching), because I hate the new functionality.

Re:Opera 9.5 released today

[Fweeky]

Opera support more platforms directly too; while Firefox supports OS X, Windows and Linux i686, Opera support all those, plus Linux x86-64/sparc/ppc, FreeBSD i386/amd64, and Solaris sparc and x86.

Of course you can't compile Opera for anything else, so I guess it's just as well.

Re:I was expecting more to see Opera 9.5 news...

[Mark Gillespie]

Funny thing is, only opera has the /. easter egg in it... Yep, type /. in the address bar to come here. Talk about cool easter eggs...

Re:But will it work?

[el_chupanegre]

Of course you can't make it work 100%, no non-trivial piece of software is bug free. I wasn't saying it should be.

However, there are a fair few pretty serious bugs on there that for me should halt release until they are fixed. Multiple daily crashes is something that can really put someone off your product.

The top bug on the page I linked is reported 14,000 times in 2 weeks. At 1,000 times per day, just for those who 1) have a beta/RC of FF3 and 2) actually bothered to report it, when that gets released and downloaded millions of times that can do some serious damage to your reputation.

Personally, I wouldn't be releasing it with that many bug reports per day for the handful of people who actually have a beta/RC.

Re:Opera 9.5 released today

[RAMMS+EIN]

By the way, the other day I was wondering what the point is in releasing your software as freeware, rather than as open source. I can see the point of _selling_ closed source software (you make money), and I can see the point of releasing as open source (you get a lot of mind share and free contributions), but when you release as freeware, you get neither advantage. So why do it?

Firefox has severe problems with IPv6

[Omnifarious]

Firefox basically can't do SOCKS proxying and connect to IPv6 sites [mozilla.org], even if you configure a SOCKS5 proxy which can handle IPv6.

Will Firefox 3 fix the annoying .net bug?

[Bananatree3]

Seriously, at least half a dozen times a day I will type in a an address into the address bar, hit enter, and then Firefox tacks a ".net" to the end of it. It directs me to some spammer squatter site, and I have to go back up to the address bar and delete the .net. I have no idea why it will happen sometimes and other times it won't. However, I was curious if other Slashdot users have experienced such an annoyance.

"Awesome"Bar (was Re:Zoom)

[Anonymous Coward]

Here's an example of the old address bar algorithm:

* Clear the address bar
* Type the letter "c"
* The sites listed are your most frequently visited sites beginning with "c"

Here's an example of the new one:

* Clear the address bar
* Type the letter "c"
* The sites listed are your most frequently visited sites with words beginning with "c", and ".com" counts as a word

There really needs to be a way to restore the old matching behavior, and as Richard_at_work says, the oldbar extension doesn't accomplish that.

It's more like an "AwfulBar" than an "AwesomeBar".

Thank you.

[Bananatree3]

You're right it isn't a bug, its a feature! I have been hitting at the very bottom end of the Enter key, so I've been simultaneously striking the top of the Shift key at the same time. I'll just make sure its more in the center next time.

FF3 Annoyances

[drew]

I've been using Firefox 3 on my linux partition since I upgraded to Ubuntu Hardy a few months ago. Honestly, I've found the new version to be more of an annoyance than anything else, although it's been hard for me to figure out how many of these annoyances were due to Firefox itself, and how many were due to Ubuntu.

1) Font rendering problems. Any font sizes specified in points were about 2-3 times the size they were supposed to be relative to anything else on the page. I eventually figured out that to fix this I had to manually set layout.css.dpi in about:config.

2) It feels significantly more sluggish than 2.0, although this has gradually been getting better lately. Maybe by the time it's actually released they will have this all worked out.

3) URL bar #1: I do find the new algorithm of the "awesomebar" to be annoying, although I can see how it might be a better experience once I get used to it. I'm going to hold off judgement on this until I've had a bit more time to get used to it, but regardless of the sorting matching algorithm, it just looks way too cluttered.

4) URL bar #2: They have changed the selection behavior in the URL bar to always select the entire url. There doesn't seem to be any way to quickly select a single portion of the URL for example to change from http://games.slashdot.org/ [slashdot.org] to http://hardware.slashdot.org/ [slashdot.org]. I have found this to be the single most annoying feature of the new Firefox by far. In fact that alone is probably enough to keep me from upgrading on my other computers.

While none of these annoyances by themselves are deal breakers, I have yet to notice any changes (from an end-user standpoint - I understand the rendering engine has been significantly improved, which is great, but doesn't really help me all that much) that really make me want to upgrade.

Re:opera is faster

[CastrTroy]

I personally suspect (although I have no proof) that is must have to do with some specific extension that a lot of people use. I've ran Firefox for weeks at a time, and only had the memory go up to about 200MB, but that's with about 15 tabs open, spread between various windows. Since so many people experience it, it must be a popular plugin. But there's enough people who experience no problems at all, that it can't be something built into the browser by default.

Re:opera is faster

[INowRegretThesePosts]

I am amazed how a closed-source app like Opera can outperform open source browsers that can supposedly integrate into the enviroment much better by such a high margin.

I am not sure Firefox developers even *care* enough about speed. Unfortunately, most developers have this attitude that "I can make code as slow as I want, and Moore's law will take care of it". Optimization is seen as a waste of time.

Re:opera is faster

[polar red]

In my opinion, 'faster' depends nearly entirely on your connection. In that light, there are other things to consider choosing a browser. In my case the 'noscript'-extension dictates my choice for FF.

Re:FF3 Annoyances

[lpangelrob]

Hmm. My experiences are limited to Win2k and OS X 10.5, so they may not apply to you.

Fonts - weird stuff sometimes. Some pages I need to increase the text size twice before it becomes readable. But most pages are OK on default.

Sluggish - I have the opposite experience in both OSes, in that it takes up significantly less memory, and renders pages faster. I've previous mentioned a GTK bug of some sort in Win2k that persists in Pidgin, so it's not a FF issue. (The most recent Win2k issue is that the Flash auto-installer just doesn't work.)

URL - I like the awesomebar because I remember titles and portions of links about 85% of the time. The awesomebar helps me out with this. Maybe getting in the habit of double-clicking the part of the URL you want to change would work better for you? (Unless you're an exclusive Ctrl+L guy... then you're just SOL.)

Re:opera is faster.. What is ALSO annoying

[davidsyes]

"Whenever we're asked "when is Firefox going to be released" we endeavor to answer to the best of our abilities, but the truth of the matter is that we'll only ever ship "when it's ready". We have a lot of indicators that help us understand when the product is ready for release: feedback from our pre-release milestones, excitement in the community and the press, availability of compatible Add-Ons, and a large active beta community helping us ensure that the release is compatible with all the various sites on the Internet."

C'mon. We have a new admin who is of the steadfast belief that NO beta-ware should be on machines except for compatibility testing. Anyone else should not be using beta-ware. That bugs me, as we ALL know that marketing deadlines make profit-drive/investor-backed companies release SHITWARE under a 1.0 or 1.1 or some moniker of "READY".

Mozilla, if you want to avert CIOs and IT admins who GENERALLY WOULD accept or permit use of FF in the office, you NEED to release more frequently and in batches that cover he easy bug kills. Making 3.x wait for SOOOOO long after 2.xx is crippling to those of us who want a blessed, ready incremental release we can feel safe (and be permitted) using. The diffs tween 2.x and 3.x are too tempting to ignore. If FF were to be non-released for, say 6 more months, it would be QUITE demoralizing to me to be denied using it at work.

Please, please consider modifying your release definition and make FF release more palatable as far as security and IT policies go.

Thanks!

Re:opera is faster

[INowRegretThesePosts]

Or they realise that aslong as it works, nobody outside of slashdot cares if it renders pages in 100ms or 200.

Years ago I saw an Opera ad and thought "Ridiculous. Internet browsing is obviously IO-bound. Having a faster browser obviously cannot improve it". When I actually tried Opera though, I was proven wrong. I then realized that other browsers were so frickin slow that yes, Opera could make internet browsing far more pleasant. I later realized that the whole "IO-bound" meme is often just an excuse for slow software... If you actually optimize the software, you find that yes, it can be made much faster.

Mind you, I nowadays don't use Opera because it is not Free Software. I use Firefox.

Re:opera is faster

[INowRegretThesePosts]

I'm a Firefox user myself. I haven't used Opera since many years ago, but only because it is proprietary software. I don't know how things are now, but last time I used Opera it was *fast*, making internet browsing far more pleasant. I would really like for Firefox to be half as performance conscious as Opera. And, by the way, a 600 MHz / 256 MB should absolutely be able to run a web browser. To say otherwise is, in my opinion, an example of "let Moore's law take care of it" attitude. Though still not as exaggerated as the attitude of some people who claim with a straight face that "Vista should not be bashed, it simply is an OS for contemporary computers with 4 GB of RAM"

And I loved Opera's UI when I tried it. Specifically, that it had tabs, and that I could save sessions. Only later did Firefox gain tabs, and only much later it gained anything resembling session saving (the "save tabs as a bookmark folder" feature, which is still not ideal, but mostly good enough).

I never had an issue with Opera's UI being "different than normal". In fact, I see that, for example, some Windows software have a crazy UI but are popular. It seems to me that a native software can be as crazy as it wants (and by the way, I find it ridiculous that programmers go out of their way to make crazy UIs instead of sticking with the default), but we hold a different standard for cross-platform software: we demand that it behaves exactly like a native application. When a reviewer examines a cross-platform software, one of the most important things in his mind is "is there any difference between the way this behaves or even *looks*, and a native application?". I, personally, find this attitude ridiculous.

In fact, it seems that one of reasons for the huge disaster that is Java UI is that Sun first had an obsession of the UI looking exactly the same on any platform, then it changed for an obsession for the UI being exactly the same as a native software. Although I concede there are far more important reasons for the train wreck that is Java UI.

Re:opera is faster

[fireboy1919]

Minimo [mozilla.org] (based on the ff3 tree) is faster, supports more javascript, and has a smaller memory footprint than Opera does on my 400Mhz Nokia N800. Minimo runs flash better, too.

Firefox 3 is a tipping point. It is the point at which Opera's claim of greater speed is quite arguable if not entirely unfounded. Considering that speed and portability are essentially the only things that Opera has going for it, the latest version of Firefox may actually destroy Opera's market.

AdBlock / FlashBlock

[bitrot42]

To the people who claim Adblock/Flashblock are deal-breakers, I've found a combination of the F12 quick menu to disable plug-ins/java/gif-animation, plus a custom hosts file that redirects doubleclick and the like, works quite nicely.

I mostly like Opera because navigating forward/back pages and between tabs is near-instant and can be done with simple keystrokes (Z&X, 1&2). There are tons of other shortcuts that help as well. I'm a madman on eBay and forum sites, plowing through stuff faster and more easily than I could with anything else. My Slashdot un-productivity is fantastic.

I also like that I don't have to deal with finding/installing/updating all sort of plugins on every machine I use. Opera has most, though not all, admittedly, of what I want built in.

To each his/her own, naturally, but Opera is well worth, er, exploring...

Re:opera is faster

[KikassAssassin]

The thing that really struck me about Opera when I started using it many years ago was that, not only was it a faster browser, it also had many innovative features that other browsers at the time didn't have which actually reduced the I/O limitations of browsing (such as container windows (which was always a more powerful solution than simple tabbed browsing), mouse gestures, bookmark nickname shortcuts, and more recently things like Speed Dial), and it made browsing much quicker and easier once you learned its tricks.

Of course, Firefox has implemented most of those features, either in the browser itself or through addons, and with the proper addons, you can make Firefox function very much like Opera, but Opera still seems to be a smoother, more polished experience to me.

They're both great browsers, though, so you really can't go wrong with either one. I tend to switch off between them just to get an idea of how they're both progressing (I've been using the Firefox 3 beta/RC for awhile, and I'm probably going to start to using Opera primarily again for awhile now that 9.5 is out).

Re:Zoom

[Workaphobia]

Mozilla doesn't seem to understand how to add new features without displacing sensible default behavior. For instance, in one of the v3 betas that I'm using now, going to an SSL-secured site where the certificate doesn't check out for any reason results in me being prompted to either leave the site or add a permanent exception for the one site. There is no option to inspect the actual certificate information. I'm sure a way exists, because the alternative is absurd, but it shouldn't take anyone who's ever used a web browser before more than five seconds to find it.

And I thought it was bad enough in previous versions that firefox displayed scary messages when it came across a self-signed certificate, just like every other browser, despite the fact that it's far more secure than plaintext.

Seriously, did you know that you can add and change advanced configuration settings through about:config, but you can't delete a setting after it's explicitly created because they want to protect you from fubaring your installation? You have to open a text editor to restore its original state.

In some respects, firefox is a lot like gnome.

Re:It was on the Ubuntui update last nite....

[BZ]

An RC is an RC. If no stop-ship bugs come up, those exact bits on disk become final, with no more changes. That includes changing text in about boxes.

Hence every RC for Firefox 3 has said "3.0" in the about box.