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.
Re:Download (Score:5, Interesting)
Automatic update? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:My findings... (Score:5, Interesting)
Cookies/Forms (Score:3, Interesting)
Memory handling doesn't seem to be much better - it's up to 220Mb already and I've only been using it 10 minutes. It's definitely faster though! The javascript engine seems WAY quicker on my own sites at least.
Re:My findings... (Score:4, Interesting)
From sluggish behavior on some sites, to full crashes, to DEP violations - it just doesn't feel like a release product.
There is no reason a vanilla install without flash should flip a DEP consistently on some sites, no matterhow badly the sites are coded. (Testing occured across several test machines, and hard core FF fanbois in our tech team. DHTML ads seemed to be at the heart of some crashes, as when a specific ad was loaded, the browser would pop Vista/XP's DEP protection.)
Performance also did hold up to Opera or even IE8 Beta1, which is a bit alarming.
The performance and stability differences got a lot worse with flash, but that is almost expected in the FF world, although flash doesn't have the same level of causing instability or loss of performance on IE7/IE8 for whatever reason.
FF3 is faster and more reliable than FF2, and it is faster than IE7, but not more reliable. IE8 for an early beta outperforming FF3 is sad and a bit scary, and may be the return of MS picking up marketshare, especially with the extra protected modes on Vista.
If you are running IE7 or FF2, I say go grab FF3, the speed is worth it, even with the occasional crashes.
Re:My findings... (Score:3, Interesting)
It was indeed "High Memory Support". I just assumed it was those people trying to squeeze the most out of their 32 bit system (and having like 4GB of ram). I'll read about it later, but thanks for that.
Has Mozilla managed to fix PDF yet? (Score:4, Interesting)
I have had to go into my task manage and kill the Acrobat plugin in order to save my browser session many times. This problem has been present in Firefox all the way back to its Netscape days, and on every computer and installation of Adobe I've ever used. It has never been present in IE.
How is it that even with PDF becoming an ISO standard, the dev team _still_ can't make their browser play nice with Acrobat?
Re:I hate the awesome bar (Score:3, Interesting)
I hate the awesome bar too.
In the version of FF I'm running (3.0), I don't have a boolean browser.urlbar.richResults, I have a browser.urlbar.maxRichResults, which is an integer.
Here's a summary of what I've been able to figure out about how to get rid of the awesome bar:
What I really want is a way to make it search only on urls, not titles. When I type a url in the url bar, I have a url in mind. I don't want it to match titles.
Re:Timezone (Score:3, Interesting)
Probably to piss off soviet rocket scientists and insensitive clods all alike.
Re:I will not.... (Score:3, Interesting)
I write open-source code because I enjoy others being able to use my code (and it doesn't hurt that I get paid for it). I don't use it for "security"; as we've seen in the Debian OpenSSL debacle, that doesn't always work.
The people who go "How do you know? Have you seen the source code?" almost invariably don't audit the code at all. Furthermore, there are cases of source code not even being enough--I am reminded of a nifty story about Ken Thompson's login hack [jargon.net].
Re:I hope they have an MSI version for windows (Score:4, Interesting)
Drake Equation (Score:1, Interesting)
Sorry to burst your bubble, but in accounting terms, you guys would be considered a rounding error.
It's sort of like the Slashdotter's version of the Drake equation:
N = (Number of slashdotters) x (Number of active Slashdot accounts) x (Time since world record attempt was announced) x (Number of Slashdotters that even use Firefox) x (Number of slashdotters that actually give a shit if Mozilla breaks the record.)
That last one weeded me out.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know - I'll take my troll mod now. Thank you, sir. May I have another?
Re:My findings... (Score:4, Interesting)
And why is good performance "alarming"?
A call to beauty techs to celebrate Firefox (Score:3, Interesting)
It is open to anyone. You just need to feature the Firefox logo with nail art, tattoos, body painting, make up, hair design, hand-made jewels...
More about the Firefox beauty tech challenge : http://forum.manucure.info/firefox-day/en/ [manucure.info]
Re:mozilla.com still shows Firefox 2 (Score:1, Interesting)
I'm done waiting, I'll try again later.
getfirefox.com? (Score:2, Interesting)
Is this no longer a valid place to download Firefox?
Passive Interest (Score:5, Interesting)
Because I'm using Linux (Ubuntu) it's more convenient for me to wait until the most recent version is in the repositories, I'm not going to sit around and hope their download page starts working.
I love the awesome bar (Score:1, Interesting)
Then I used it for a while. It grows on you. I need to go to the bug talking about threaded view issues, but I just can't remember which number that was. Solution: "bug thread..." oh look, there it is!
Now what was that DOM spec? w3.org/TR/... er...; now it's w3c dom, oh look, there it is!
Remember that page linked to from slashdot about the watchmacallit. Under the old searchbar, you have to try to remember which site it came from; the new one allows you to use the title. I must tell you, there were more than a few times when I wanted to search the title when looking for an old link in FF 2.
So, if you hate it, suck it up, use it for a few weeks, and then reevaluate your opinions.
Re:I hate the awesome bar (Score:1, Interesting)
Several times a day I find myself looking at a website and wondering how the hell I got there.
A few weeks ago I brought the FF window to the foreground to find myself staring at the Canadian Revenue Service home page. I'm not canadian, and definitely hadn't been to the CRS before. After some thought I realized I'd hit the loc bar and typed 'cr' expecting 'cragslist.org' which I frequent several times a day and hit enter to load the page like I've done for years in other browsers.
I'm sure awesome bar is great for some people, but those of us who loathe it really loathe it. It was enough to make me switch to Epiphany for a while, but the lack of firebug plugin brought me back.
Re:I hate the awesome bar (Score:3, Interesting)
How about prefixing your searches with
I use the search bar for searches. I use the URL bar for URLs. So, why would I ever type
Looks to me like the desire for power and influence over the bottom 50% has perverted yet another useful tool one step closer to being a television.
Re:Download (Score:5, Interesting)
Firefox is, without a doubt, the pet browser of Slashdot and for good reason. It rises from the ashes of the once great Netscape. As you may recall, Netscape was pounded into smush market share-wise by the integration of IE and Windows (which in turn caused Windows to be about the most insecure operating system on the planet).
The gecko engine came about and Phoenix was created, then renamed Firebird, then onto Firefox, with a Netscape branded browser using the same engine.
Firefox remains fairly standards compliant and open source, free as in freedom. Slashdot is a huge proponent of such things, so of course Firefox gets free advertising -- as in freedom and as in beer.
MD5s? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:I will not.... (Score:1, Interesting)
I've been a regular opera user since 2003 and it's my perferred browser (unless a particular site hates Opera [looking at you microsoft...]). However, Opera 9.5 has been mixed for me so far. It's much faster in regards to page load compared to the prior version, but it has some annoying bugs that need fixed. Perhaps it's from not having the open source testing base that firefox does or perhaps it was just a rush job to get it out before Firefox3.
For one, my tabs decide they don't want to highlight at times on hover. On top of that, they might decide to take on the name of another tab already opened and closing the tab doesnt have the expected result (it decides to close some other tab instead). Opera also decided to say "screw you" in terms of custom settings. I had to reset shortcuts like the links download (ctrl+shift+j) because they made it +l now. There's quite a few other things they override for your settings as well I won't get into.
I've also had problems with flash movies not working properly at times on youtube, but not very often.
To me, it seems like Opera released 9.5 a bit early and it's really a beta3 version, not the final. I assume it was to jump ahead of firefox, but not totally sure. At least Opera finally has some decent web developer tools. That was something I had to always rely on firefox for.
64-bit (Score:2, Interesting)