Does this count towards the World Record Attempt? [spreadfirefox.com]

Will my FF 2.0.0.14 automatically get updated to FF 3?

I'm at 150MB with seven tabs which is fine with me. The real kicker is that Firefox has been running for at least a week now. FF2 would have slowly bloated to 400MB right about now and I would have been restarting it. I don't mind that it's using 20MB per tab as long as it's using it wisely and intelligently (for what it's worth I have 2GB at work). It has a lot of info in memory so everything is very snappy. I can reopen up to 10 closed tabs, go back in 15 pages in history on a tab that has been open since FF2 (and it has history from then too), and heck, I even like the so-called Awesome Bar. Typing just one word from the title or url has helped me out tremendously.

Is it me, or does Firefox 3 not keep your old cookies and passwords etc? I seem to have to relogin to every website.

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.

Our internel tests show FF3 has some holes in terms of performance and stability.

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.

+1 helpful

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.

I am a Firefox user, but it absolutely _astounds_ me that the devs still can't manage to make their browser work well with Adobe's PDF plugin in Windows. In this day and age, trying to open a PDF should not take 30 seconds - 1 min to render, and even if it does it also shouldn't freeze the rest of the browser up.

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?

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:

• To revert to the old-style graphics, use the oldbar addon [mozilla.org]. This has no effect on the actual completion algorithm, just on the way the results are displayed.
• Set browser.urlbar.matchOnlyTyped to true. This is supposed to make it only match results that you've actually typed before. However, it will not stop it from matching titles of pages.
• Setting browser.urlbar.maxRichResults to 0 does not change it back to the old behavior. It just prevents results from being shown in a pop-up menu at all. Setting it to less than the default of 12 can, however, reduce the amount of screen space taken up by the menu.
• Setting browser.urlbar.matchBehavior [mozillazine.org] to 2 makes the matching algorithm slightly more like the old one. It will only match things that lie at the beginning of a word boundary. This cuts down on the number of stupid matches, e.g., it will no longer match "ebay" with "thepiratebay."

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.

You said it - "standard" time. We all know how USA likes to not use standard units.
Probably to piss off soviet rocket scientists and insensitive clods all alike.

Spot-on.

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].

Mod parent up. There would be firefox on more than two of my organization's workstations if i could easily deploy and update it. Updating firefox by hand on 400 workstations is not an option, so we simply dont make in an option to the users, even the ones that request it.

Let's get a grip on reality, dude. [arstechnica.com] Slashdot isn't anywhere near as big 'n' important as you geeks want like to think it is. How many active slashdot accounts are there?

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?

You mind posting which sites caused the DEP violations? I'm a regular Firefox user, and I've been using 3.0 since the first public betas. I never once have seen anything like that (in fact, I've never seen it DEP on anything, ever.

And why is good performance "alarming"?

As a different way to advocate and to celebrate Firefox 3, the french community of beauty technicians has set a challenge up.

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]

Agreed. It still isn't available yet.

I'm done waiting, I'll try again later.

After hitting refresh a couple of times, I get http://getfirefox.com/ [getfirefox.com] to respond and it brings up the download page for... Firefox 2.

Is this no longer a valid place to download Firefox?

I was sort of interested in helping them boost the download stats, but due to the mismanagement of this event I've mostly lost interest. When I woke up this morning I expected it to be available but it wasn't. By 10am there was still no real official word as to when this whole shindig was supposed to take place. If you're going to have an event, it would be good to give people advance notice as to when it begins. I didn't even know when it starts until 45 minutes after it began. Now trying to download, it's obvious they weren't even prepared for it because the page is down.

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.

When I first started using FF 3.0b*, I hated the awesome bar too: it ruined my nice setups to quickly hit wikipedia articles or whatnot.

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.

I agree, such a major change should provide an opt-out.. especially when doing so should be relatively simple.

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.

Can anyone suggest how you might go about tweaking the SQL it passes to SQL Lite to only search URLs (not necessarily only typed ones, but not page titles) and without the leading wildcard?

How about prefixing your searches with // as if it were a search keyword? After some uses you'll have this behavior habituated and won't notice it.

I use the search bar for searches. I use the URL bar for URLs. So, why would I ever type // into that bar without an https: in front of it? So I can fit into Mozillas scheme to capture the Luddites of the world and increase their market share?

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.

If Microsoft did this, everyone here would think this is a lame attempt at getting free advertising, which it is.

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.

Does anyone have a list of MD5s or SHAs for Firefox? Specifically, right now I'd like to check the en-GB Windows .exe version.

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.

Will there be (is there?) a natively supported 64-bit version of FF3? I haven't been following the beta releases very close so I'm not sure if it has been suggested/discussed/quashed. With FF2 I know there was a non-official release that someone threw together for 64-bit, but it had issues with flash and other embedded content.