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Mozilla Software The Internet

Firefox Download Day To Start At 1 p.m. EST 1080

Posted by timothy from the there's-no-pleasing-some-people dept.
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.
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Firefox Download Day To Start At 1 p.m. EST More

Firefox Download Day To Start At 1 p.m. EST

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  • Download (Score:5, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 17, 2008 @10:31AM (#23823801)
    Download [mozilla.org]

  • I will not.... (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 17, 2008 @10:32AM (#23823811)
    be downloading FF!

    IE 5 is good enough for me!

    • Re:I will not.... (Score:5, Funny)

      by kvezach ( 1199717 ) on Tuesday June 17, 2008 @10:39AM (#23823971)
      IE 5 is good enough for me!

      I know, but did you have to advertise it? I had just finished owning your computer; now all the other slashdotters will get on and kick me off with their own kits!

    • Re:I will not.... (Score:5, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 17, 2008 @11:54AM (#23825181)
      me neither. Opera 9.5 is good enough for me.

      Actually, that's a lie - I'll definitely install it and try it out, though unless it's particularly awesome I doubt I'll be using it much.

      EDIT: fanboy tirade about unjest treatment of Opera on slashdot and why you should try Opera follows. I could delete the following section, but I'll leave it up to the moderators to mod me fanboy or troll.

      Is the "awesome bar" really as awesome as Opera's full history search from the title bar that lets you search for any phrase in any page in the cache... for instance, I could find slashdot again by typing "anonymous coward" if I forgot the url or title, or maybe just something from the post I was reading like "firefox download".

      Also, though Opera still lacks extensions, it does seem to have caught up with regard to add blocking, and it's had really easy options to disable sound, plugins (like flash), java or javascript, identify as other browsers, change encoding, full zoom on all page elements, etc. for ages.

      Even if you think the fact Opera being closed source is shit, it's pretty impressive that it's so packed with features whilst still being small and fast. Firefox 2 always felt a bit clunky to me, though I've heard 3 is a lot better, so that's something I'm looking forward to testing.

      I'm only posting this because I'm a bit annoyed that the post about the release of Opera 9.5, which is a pretty major Opera release got attached to a fucking post announcing the release of Firefox 3 this Tuesday after there have already been tons of posts about betas and mozilla marketting schemes. I know not as many people use Opera as use FF, but it is a nice piece of free software which easily competes with FF on many levels and should be of interest to many /. readers.

  • Download DAY, Justin (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Bertie ( 87778 ) on Tuesday June 17, 2008 @10:32AM (#23823821) Homepage
    Why's he moaning about what time it starts at when people have a whole twenty-four hours to find a suitable time to download the thing? It's not like we all have to sprint to our computers and start it on the minute.

    • Re:Download DAY, Justin (Score:5, Funny)

      by penguin_dance ( 536599 ) on Tuesday June 17, 2008 @11:13AM (#23824537)
      But if he waits too long, they might run out. ;-)

    • Re:Download DAY, Justin (Score:5, Funny)

      by Sabz5150 ( 1230938 ) on Tuesday June 17, 2008 @11:17AM (#23824581)

      Why's he moaning about what time it starts at when people have a whole twenty-four hours to find a suitable time to download the thing? It's not like we all have to sprint to our computers and start it on the minute.
      We are Slashdot! Turning servers into slag is what we do best!

    • Re: (Score:3, Funny)

      by julesh ( 229690 )
      It's not like we all have to sprint to our computers and start it on the minute.

      In fact, the organisers are probably relying on the fact that we won't. If a record-breaking number of downloads for a 24 hour period occurred all starting within a few minutes of each other, I don't think even mozilla.org's servers would survive for long.

  • Don't you mean 1pm EDT? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by holden caufield ( 111364 ) on Tuesday June 17, 2008 @10:34AM (#23823849)
    I thought we were in Daylight Saving Time until November?

  • I hate the awesome bar (Score:5, Informative)

    by kill-1 ( 36256 ) on Tuesday June 17, 2008 @10:35AM (#23823873)
    Here is how to get more or less the old behavior. Go to about:config and set browser.urlbar.matchOnlyTyped to true and browser.urlbar.richResults to false. Then restart.

    • Re:I hate the awesome bar (Score:5, Informative)

      by daranz ( 914716 ) on Tuesday June 17, 2008 @10:45AM (#23824073)
      There's also the Oldbar [mozilla.org] extension.

      Seems like the awesome bar is something that people either love or hate. Personally, I don't like it. I prefer my URL bar to do straight autocompletion, rather than search through my history and bookmarks for matches. I use the URL bar to type in URLs, and while the awesome bar adds some nifty functionality it breaks that basic feature.

      • Re:I hate the awesome bar (Score:5, Informative)

        by abaddononion ( 1004472 ) on Tuesday June 17, 2008 @10:53AM (#23824201)
        It's important to note this, from the oldbar site:

        Note that the underlying autocomplete algorithm is the Firefox 3 algorithm, not the Firefox 2 algorithm. oldbar only affects the presentation of the results.

        Oldbar, while nice, only changes appearance, not functionality.

        Im with you guys, though. I despise the awesome bar, and dont understand why there isnt an easier/obvious way to get the old, URL based behavior. A URL bar that works based on URLs?! Blasphemy!

    • Re:I hate the awesome bar (Score:4, Informative)

      by ShieldW0lf ( 601553 ) on Tuesday June 17, 2008 @10:52AM (#23824177) Journal
      This doesn't give the old behavior. When you type "foo" in the address bar, it does a pattern search for "LIKE '%foo%'", rather than doing a pattern search for "LIKE 'foo%'" as you would expect from an auto-complete algorithm.

      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?

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by rantingkitten ( 938138 )
      Ah, bless you. I detest the "awesome bar" also, as I detest and loathe pretty much any application which tries to suggest to me what I want to do. Don't autocomplete my words. Don't underline words you think are spelled incorrectly. Don't mark up my grammar, don't suggest what sites I might be trying to visit. Just let me handle it and stay out of my face.

      I will disable that piece of crap as soon as I get my hands on it.

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by bcrowell ( 177657 )

      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

    • Correction to the GPs post (Score:5, Informative)

      by macdaddy ( 38372 ) on Tuesday June 17, 2008 @12:03PM (#23825411) Homepage Journal
      I would have modded you down as being inaccurate but doing so would mean that I couldn't correct the inaccuracy. So I'm passing up on the opportunity to mod you and am instead going to fix the mistake.

      As of FireFox 3.0b3 browser.urlbar.richResults no longer works [google.com]. The ability to chose your own search results style was removed by the Mozilla developers as part of bug #407836 [mozilla.org]. They're illogical viewpoint is explained in bug #403159 [mozilla.org].

      And, for the record, Oldbar does not fix the problem. It does not disable the searching style introduced by FF 3.0. It only makes the results look a little more like 2.0.

      According to this [zacgarrett.com] article browser.urlbar.matchOnlyTyped no longer works either. The value of browser.urlbar.matchOnlyTyped is now ignored.

      It's not the GP's fault either. Dozens of articles have been published in the past few months that have old, outdated information. Even Redhat put it in their Knowledgebase [redhat.com] on 6/4. The sheer number of articles attempting to help people disable the "awesome bar" should make the developers realize that this is not a "feature" that everyone wants. I agree with the GP. I too HATE the awesome bar. It's a shame too because I would love to have the fixes for the memory leaks in FF 2.0 that don't exist but FF 3.0 addresses anyway.

    • Re:I hate the awesome bar (Score:5, Insightful)

      by De Lemming ( 227104 ) on Tuesday June 17, 2008 @12:27PM (#23826035) Homepage
      Some people do not like the new URL bar because it gives too much (unwanted) results because it also looks in your bookmarks and the browser history.

      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.

  • Firefox Download Day (Score:5, Informative)

    by Volanin ( 935080 ) on Tuesday June 17, 2008 @10:38AM (#23823935)
    For those who still don't know, Mozilla is trying to enter GUINNESS
    for most software downloads in a 24-hour period. Check it here:

    http://www.spreadfirefox.com/worldrecord/ [spreadfirefox.com]

    Everybody is asked to participate by downloading one single copy of
    Firefox 3.0 today, June 17th!

    ONLY FULL DOWNLOADS ARE CONSIDERED!
    So, go to the Firefox site and get one FULL COPY!

    http://www.getfirefox.com/ [getfirefox.com]

  • I don't think they're going to meet their goal (Score:5, Informative)

    by alta ( 1263 ) on Tuesday June 17, 2008 @10:38AM (#23823939) Homepage Journal
    When I go to the site I get:

    The connection was reset

    The connection to the server was reset while the page was loading.

    And this was with FF 2.0.0.14, so they can't blame my client.

  • I hope they have an MSI version for windows (Score:5, Insightful)

    by denis-The-menace ( 471988 ) on Tuesday June 17, 2008 @10:50AM (#23824141)
    Otherwise all this hype will not convince corps to switch.

    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.

  • Cookies/Forms (Score:3, Interesting)

    by nmg196 ( 184961 ) * on Tuesday June 17, 2008 @10:56AM (#23824227)
    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.

  • 17th started at GMT (Score:5, Insightful)

    by rescue me ( 1067874 ) on Tuesday June 17, 2008 @10:56AM (#23824231)
    1. Why did this not start on GMT so it was the 17th for the whole world at the normal time. 2. Why was it so hard to find a Mozillia definition of the 17th ;-) Smart guys and gals could have made this simpler.

  • Timezone (Score:5, Insightful)

    by erik.martino ( 997000 ) on Tuesday June 17, 2008 @11:02AM (#23824345)
    Why do slashdot use obscure timezones like PST EST XST when there is a standard UTC?

  • Has Mozilla managed to fix PDF yet? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by SkOink ( 212592 ) on Tuesday June 17, 2008 @11:24AM (#23824701) Homepage
    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?

  • Hmmm (Score:5, Funny)

    by bluie- ( 1172769 ) on Tuesday June 17, 2008 @12:00PM (#23825319)
    The site seems to be bogged down for some reason...

  • Yo'all Better Hope... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Nom du Keyboard ( 633989 ) on Tuesday June 17, 2008 @12:05PM (#23825447)
    Yo'all better hope that there isn't a Zero Day vulnerability in FF3 that the virus writing scum uncovered when they participated in the testing, as you know they have.

    Personally I'm going to wait for a few days just to ensure that no reported problems surface.

  • 1:04pm (Score:5, Funny)

    by mattwarden ( 699984 ) on Tuesday June 17, 2008 @12:05PM (#23825455)
    The servers, the servers, the servers are on fire.
    The servers, the servers, the servers are on fire.
    We don't need to download let the motherf***ers burn.
    Burn motherf***ers, burn.

  • DDOS world record (Score:5, Funny)

    by renrutal ( 872592 ) <renrutal@gmail.com> on Tuesday June 17, 2008 @12:07PM (#23825503)
    I believe they will attempt the world record for the largest, willing, Distributed Denial of Service Attack.

    Well, what the hell, lets help bury their servers :)

  • Slashdotted (Score:4, Insightful)

    by BitZtream ( 692029 ) on Tuesday June 17, 2008 @12:10PM (#23825585)
    Awesome ... 9 minutes after they open the gates and the site is already offline ... I guess its good they make web browsers and not web servers.

  • Hoax! (Score:5, Funny)

    by birdguy ( 130777 ) on Tuesday June 17, 2008 @12:35PM (#23826223)
    The idea of having the largest one day download was a Microsoft hoax designed to create a DOS attack on Mozilla.

  • Okay Everyone ... (Score:5, Funny)

    by Archangel Michael ( 180766 ) on Tuesday June 17, 2008 @12:36PM (#23826251) Journal
    Keep hitting that "refresh" button to try and get to the Download site. I'm pretty sure that will help out the slashdot effect!

  • 1:46PM and still no download (Score:5, Insightful)

    by skrowl ( 100307 ) on Tuesday June 17, 2008 @12:47PM (#23826509) Homepage
    Their web servers are toasted. When you try to do something like set a download record, perhaps you should ensure your IT infrastructure can handle it as well as your PR infrastructure can.

  • Passive Interest (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Jekler ( 626699 ) on Tuesday June 17, 2008 @12:51PM (#23826623)
    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.

  • My bad - (Score:5, Funny)

    by BucketOfLard ( 928627 ) on Tuesday June 17, 2008 @12:54PM (#23826723)
    Sorry people - I meant to hit DOWNLOAD, but accidentally hit DOS ATTACK.
    Boy is my face red.

  • Firefox 3 Coming Soon! (Score:5, Informative)

    by pdboddy ( 620164 ) <pdboddy@gm3.14ail.com minus pi> on Tuesday June 17, 2008 @01:14PM (#23827151) Journal
    http://blog.mozilla.com/blog/2008/06/17/firefox-3-coming-soon/ [mozilla.com] "The outpouring of interest and enthusiasm around Firefox 3 has been overwhelming (literally!). Our servers are currently feeling the burn and should be back to normal shortly. Download day will officially commence once the site goes live. The 24 hours period will be clocked from that moment. Thanks for your continued support." Posted by Melissa Shapiro There we have it... We helped slashdot Mozilla. :P

  • FireFox successfully D.O.S. attacked themselves (Score:5, Funny)

    by jackspenn ( 682188 ) on Tuesday June 17, 2008 @01:27PM (#23827383)
    Sites been down for awhile. Maybe the Mozilla team can get the Guinness Book of World Record's "Most effective self inflicted denial of service attack."

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