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.

Comments

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.

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.

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: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: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, even if you configure a SOCKS5 proxy which can handle IPv6.

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/ to http://hardware.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

[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

[fireboy1919]

Minimo (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.