Firefox Download Day To Start At 1 p.m. EST 1080
boustrophedon writes "Starting at midnight in their local timezones, downloaders have been asking when Firefox 3 will be ready for Firefox Download Day, June 17, 2008. Mary announced on the Spread Firefox Forum that downloads will commence at 10 AM PST." That means 1 p.m. East Coast time, and, in Justin Mason's view, some pretty annoying times of day for many parts of the world.
Reader CorinneI supplies a link to PC Magazine's (very positive) overview of the new version's features, which praises the "speedy performance, thrifty memory usage, and, in particular, the address bar that now predicts where you want to go when you start typing (what Mozilla insiders refer to as the Awesome Bar)." FF3, even in Beta and RC form, and even with the extension incompatibilities I've run into, has quickly replaced FF2 as my preferred browser — for me, the improved drop-down autocomplete behavior alone is enough to justify the switch.
I will be happy if they have controls (Score:1, Insightful)
Download DAY, Justin (Score:5, Insightful)
Don't you mean 1pm EDT? (Score:5, Insightful)
My findings... (Score:1, Insightful)
The new address bar - it's different, but I hadn't noticed that it's any better or worse than FF2.
However, I've run into no lockups, which I did often with FF2. The browser seems a bit more responsive as well. Overall, it's definitely an improvement and pretty much a required upgrade for those using FF2, since it improves on FF2 and doesn't seem to introduce any unwanted features, except perhaps the handling of bookmarks.
Re:And unofficially... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:My findings... (Score:5, Insightful)
I guess, what's ultimate is a program that can scale its memory usage depending on availability. But I don't have any problems, so I won't complain.
Re:My findings... (Score:2, Insightful)
Here I am typing this in Firefox, one window with only 4 tabs (iGoogle with nothing fancy, slashdot, airninja and google maps) and firefox is 97.2 MB already...
Just yesterday I downloaded Opera 9.5 and after using it for some time and having two windows open (each one in a different virtual desktop and with about 5 tabs each one), it occurred to me check the memory foot print (two windows after all, i thought, should be eating quite some ram). To my surprise it was no more than 30 MB.
Now, I do not know what those guys at Opera do right, but Firefox 3 is still a bloated beast compared to that...
Of course I still like Fx, as I use several extensions like scrapbook, del.icio.us, refspoof
So far, I have only found a replacement for adblock+.
The [other] good thing about this Fx release is that Opera, Microsoft and even Apple will have to continue improving their browsers if they do not want to stay behind
I hope they have an MSI version for windows (Score:5, Insightful)
Why MSI?
-it's a corp standard.(STD switches, behavior)
-It's customizable without changing the original package
-It is designed from the ground up to run unattended or silent regardless if it's an upgrade or a new install.
And Frontmotion (www.frontmotion.com/) != Mozilla
It's a trust issue. Corps want "warm and fuzzies" and not what they will view as a hack.
If Mozilla doesn't want to make an MSI package but still wants to entice the Corps to switch, host Frontmotion's MSI from the Mozilla site.
Having GPO support or preinstalled Addons are gravy at this point.
17th started at GMT (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:My findings... (Score:5, Insightful)
Images, html, css, content, media.. all of that takes up space. Firefox has to hold it in memory so it can display it quickly when you click on the tab.
How much would you be complaining if you had to wait 5 seconds every time you switched tabs so it could swap in from disk?
Re:I hate the awesome bar (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:And unofficially... (Score:2, Insightful)
It should have started at 00:00 GMT.
I downloaded FF3.0 about 8 hours ago. If they can't release at a reasonable hour then screw the record attempt.
Timezone (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Time Zones (Score:2, Insightful)
Pedantic alert. There is no such thing as 12 PM (or AM for that matter). It is either 12 noon or 12 midnight.
To be a bit more ontopic, I will not d/l this version of Fx until there is an easy, non-extension way to disable the 'awesome bar'. I do not want to have something suggest to me where I want to go. I specifically disabled this option in the current version. I am quite capable of deciding what address I want to visit. I thought we wanted to move away from "Where do you want to go today?".
Re:I will not.... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Download DAY, Justin (Score:2, Insightful)
Mozilla really dropped the ball on this. If they had detailed up front exactly when their "Day" was planned to start, then all this angst could have been avoided. Ideally they should have had a countdown timer on their site so that everyone was on the same page. Announcing the rules after the game has already kicked off was just plain stupid.
Re:I will not.... (Score:2, Insightful)
Opera 9.5 is a very good quality browser. Judging by the amazing feature set of the Firefox 3 beta's & RC's I think FF3 will just grab my top spot vote, but Opera 9.5 is definitely up there in 2nd place. It's got a couple of really useful features it does better than anyone!
Re:Has Mozilla managed to fix PDF yet? (Score:5, Insightful)
You might want to consider using a PDF reader that sucks less. Foxit is pretty decent for Windows.
Re:And unofficially... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:GMT -5 (Score:3, Insightful)
It would have been much easier all-round to give the time as 17:00 GMT (UTC). Or just use a 48-hour period, that way everyone's idea of the 17th would count.
Re:I hate the awesome bar (Score:3, Insightful)
Here are the list of problems I've found:
1) It searches your bookmarks. If I wanted to go to a bookmark, I'd have clicked on one. That's what they're for.
2) It searches the middle of words. When you type in "s" for slashdot it's going to bring up every page with an s in any word in the title, and an s in any location in the url.
3) It breaks muscle memory. The results seem to occur in random order. and to get it to be consistant you need to type nearly the whole url. The learning behaviour means that results will continually swap around.
4) The font is too large, and only 12 entries are listed. This makes it nearly useless. The old default was 25 entries.
5) It doesn't seem to take into account website home pages. Compared to FF2, this algorithm puts a whole heap of crappy leaf pages before the root of a site. The reason for this is probably that the leaf pages usually have more interesting titles.
6) The rational for the searching of titles is it allows you to find a page you've forgotten the url of. This is nice. However... I enter new url's in the address bar every five minutes to go to sites I know about. I forget a site I saw perhaps once a month. So the extra searching is the wrong behaviour nearly 100% of the time.
These problems can all be fixed. Probably the simplest way to drastically improve the results is to by default turn off the title and middle-of-word searching. Turn it on only if there is a space in the address bar. By using multiple keywords, the user is asking for a more advanced search.
With a few tweaks to algorithm, it should be able to return consistent results so that muscle memory works again. Using a FF2-like algorithm for the first few results, and FF3 for the rest will probably fix this.
Finally, there is an enormous thread about this horrible feature on the firefox forum. It is full of developers with their head in the sand saying that users will like it eventually. No we don`t. The user is right. Not the developer. The complaining has typically been nonconstructive. However, users don't really know exactly how to get what they want. The job of a developer is to distill their responses into real fixes. However, if the users are ignored the developers will quickly find how easy it is to fork an OSS project.
That's nothing! Compared to FF2... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:I will not.... (Score:3, Insightful)
How do you know? Have you seen the source code?
I doubt that it would have. But really, how can you know without seeing the source? That is why I prefer open source.
Re:My findings... (Score:4, Insightful)
I don't understand this obsession of ram usage, and this is from someone with a laptop with 512MB's, and primary computer of 844MB (as reported by the OS, but 1GB in the official specs). But, I want my RAM to be used (if it's going to make performance better). That's why I have it.
The product I make displays documents of tens of thousands of pages with color content at 600 DPI, flips pages practically instantly, and uses less than 20 megabytes of RAM while doing so.
Crappy code is no excuse.
Re:Timezone (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Download (Score:4, Insightful)
You think the servers will crash??? (Score:2, Insightful)
Yo'all Better Hope... (Score:5, Insightful)
Personally I'm going to wait for a few days just to ensure that no reported problems surface.
Re:I will not.... (Score:4, Insightful)
They don't have to. Only a small percentage actually have to audit the code, and that benefits everyone. The code still has to be open to allow this though.
Re:And unofficially... (Score:4, Insightful)
Slashdotted (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:My findings... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Download DAY, Justin (Score:2, Insightful)
You have 24 hours to download it. If you want to download it at 1 AM your time, you can do so. If you want to download it at 11 PM your time, you can also do so. In fact, I'd daresay that you can download it at any time you want!
Re:Download (Score:5, Insightful)
"There were problems checking for, downloading or installing this update. Firefox could not be updatd because: AUS: No data was received (Please try again)"
Same for mozilla.org, spreadfirefox.com. Yes, I know I can wait. I've already waited for the damn thing to start.
I hope this stunt gets them to concentrate on the product rather than the publicity. The success of Firefox was not because of advertising, it was a good product spread by WOM and email.
Re:Slashdotted (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Download (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Just a Question.... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:I hate the awesome bar (Score:5, Insightful)
I'd just like to point out that it adaptively learns how to sort the results, so you shouldn't discard it on first use. Give it some time to come up with the most relevant URLs (for you) on top.
Re:public relations disaster (Score:2, Insightful)
1:46PM and still no download (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Timezone (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:I'll pick it up (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:My findings... (Score:4, Insightful)
Interesting you ask, as I just read an article that came away with an initial impression not unlike our own testing.
http://www.crn.com/software/208403208?cid=microsoftFeed [crn.com]
As for IE8 performance... I mean (Load Time, Page Load Times. high content performance on the page, RAM usage, responsiviness, etc.) The difference between IE7 and IE8 is significant, and IE7 wasn't so bad... (IE8 has rewritten everything from script handling, to page composition, etc.) If it wasn't from MS, it would be a browser people would be proud of in terms of performance gains.
You once again falsely state that IE rides on the coat tails of explorer.exe, this myth needs to die, as this has not been the case since IE6, especially on Vista, where explorer.exe and iexplorer.exe share NOTHING, so it doesn't get a footprint break as many assume because of IE4 Win98's shared process model where Explorer.exe and IE literally shared processes.
In fact even IE6 only marginally shared DLLs with Explorer.exe on XP, and still kept them in their own memory space, consuming just as much RAM as if explorer.exe was involved. (Test yourself, kill explorer.exe, iexplorer.exe doesn't die, and RAM for IE don't change and hasn't since Win98.) (NT doesn't even technically allow for what Win98/IE4/IE5 was doing.)
IE7/IE8 run are not tied to anything, and get no 'shared' benefits. Even in Vista, HTML rendering in folders is not an option, nor Active Desktop (the original desktop WIdgets from Win98). The HTML rendering frameworkis a 'callable' part of Windows, but if these threads/process call it, they get the RAM load, etc, and this not shared, just as if another application used the Mozilla engine, it would still have to load it in its own application space.
So people still claiming that 'IE has advantages' because of 'shared' resources/RAM with Explorer.exe/OS are just spreading a very old myth that needs to finally die, starting here.
Check out the link above, even though it doesn't seem to be a comprehensive test, it hits were are initial reactions are too.
Re:Download (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Download DAY, Justin (Score:3, Insightful)
Since a lot of people around the global now have to wait late in the day before they can download, the download servers are now likely to have to deal with much more traffic all at once... so it goes slower for everyone, OR crashes altogether.
Not that I'm complaining about Mozilla themselves, or Firefox, or all the fantastic work many people have done to get this working.... but the organisation of this here stunt is a bit, well, crap!
Plus, since I am speaking from "The Future", and have come here to post about the problem, I *must* be right!
Re:I will not.... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Download (Score:3, Insightful)
I think they'll get a record all right: a record number of people giving up and never coming back because they heard about this great browser but couldn't get it.
What exactly is Mozilla DOING with all the money Google gives it? Google doesn't go down when they update something.
Re:Timezone (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Timezone (Score:4, Insightful)
Bullshit. We all (at least us here at
But if you use the shortname of a specific timezone, the info is only understandable to people who know the difference between their local timezone and the named timezone.
You could just as well measure time in inches...
Re:Correction to the GPs post (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Correction to the GPs post (Score:5, Insightful)
Essentially what we are debating here is a fundamental change in what the location bar is for, from purely a widget for directly entering URLs, to being a local search engine for content you have seen on the Web (which happens to also display URLs).
Re:Download (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Timezone (Score:5, Insightful)
Ramble:
The metric system may not be widely accepted among the general public in the US, but scientists use it, and so do many manufacturers and government agencies are supposed to as well. The standardized systems are there; the general public just refuses to use them, and signage/label makers aren't exactly helping things along.
I like to drive people nuts by routinely using metric measurements and 24-hour time; I've had people scratch their heads at my car's dashboard because it gives time in those weird military units and happily will tell you the outside temperature in Celsius. (Thank you, VW, for leaving the worldwide preference menus in the US version of the GTI!). Soon I plan to acclimatize myself to metric fuel consumption readings; which is the standard used outside the US? I have several choices, such as km/L or L/100 km. Which one should I select?
I got used to the metric system by just using it. Surely, the rest of us can do the same. It really is easier using base-10 instead of the crazy and arcane system that's "standard" here. I've already long since given up on weights and volumes when at the grocery store and just look at the metric equivalent on the label.
Re:Correction to the GPs post (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Correction to the GPs post (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:My findings... (Score:2, Insightful)
People want the gov't to widen expressways to relieve congestion at peak hours, even though for 22 or so hours a day, the lanes in a given direction are fairly clear (YMMV).
On an individual level, many people would be satisfied with a small car for 95% or more of their trips, but they buy a van or an SUV for that rare trip where they need to carry lumber home or move their teenager into a new dorm.
People are used to being able to handle peak capacity, even if that means gross amounts of waste when all that capacity isn't being used. Sometimes the cost of not being able to handle peak capacity outweighs the cost of providing peak capacity all the time. Other analogies include: electricity supply, idle workers at a construction site, etc.
- RG>
Download it anyway (Score:3, Insightful)
db