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Firefox Download Day To Start At 1 p.m. EST
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... to enable and disable the color profile management.
--Ed-- - Cub fans... This is the year! http://www.100yearsorbust.com
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.
I thought we were in Daylight Saving Time until November?
I'll create an amusing sig when I have something meaningful to post.
I've been using the RC releases, and while I do like the new browser, the memory footprint is still a monster. Currently, it's using over 175MB of ram for the windows I have open (21 different pages) - and that seems excessive to me.
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.
It doesn't fall in the download window though, so you aren't counting towards the final tally.
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.
Obama's legacy: (N)othing (S)ecure (A)nywhere and (T)error (S)imulation (A)dministration
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.
Because most settings are parsed and handled only at startup. In the base of the Awesome Bar, I don't see why they couldn't have supported switching but it's prbably just not a big priority. As for addons, the way the extension points are handled and how XUL from extensions is merged with the browser such that extensions can even complete replace standard XUL in the browser requires reparsing and merging all markup. You have to reload everything. I've often wondered about themes in FF, however, since the skinning used is fairly straight forward and is most often just CSS and images. Of course, all this I think is moot since Firefox can restore your previous session and restarts so quick I really don't mind.
They should have started Download Day at the right time then instead of waiting until the majority of the world was already on the 18th.
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.
Why do slashdot use obscure timezones like PST EST XST when there is a standard UTC?
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?".
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
Its closed source no-one knows what could be in there!
IranAir Flight 655 never forget!
Opera doesn't have built-in spyware! Please make sure you actually know what your talking about rather than spurting out complete rubbish.
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!
To be fair that's as much Adobe's fault for loading Acrobat with twenty times more extraneous BS than is needed to render a PDF. Mozilla should handle it more gracefully, maybe, but if you've ever tried opening Acrobat by itself, you know it takes bloody ages. And then nags you to update or register or update your registration or register your updates.
You might want to consider using a PDF reader that sucks less. Foxit is pretty decent for Windows.
mirrorshades radio -- darkwave, industrial, futurepop, ebm.
Then they shouldn't have posted the binaries to be available yet.
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.
The awful bar sucks, and the way to get it to be a halfway useful UI is almost impossible for a normal use to do. I think this will pose a bit of a public relations nightmare for the project. :-/
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.
Having Yahoo email, hotmail, and Pandora open, as well as one other tab for various browsing, would regularly net my memory usage to 270 - 400 MB of RAM. With FF3 RC, my memory usage with the same pages is 130 - 160 MB. That's a WORLD of difference. It's significantly faster, too.
> Opera doesn't have built-in spyware!
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.
I for one will not be downloading Firefox 3 until this record attempt is over. I think it's just plain silly.
What better way to make sure your servers will all crash than to state a specific time for everyone to download the new version!?!?!?!?
Personally I'm going to wait for a few days just to ensure that no reported problems surface.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
The people who go "How do you know? Have you seen the source code?" almost invariably don't audit the code at all.
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.
-- MartinG To mail me: echo kewyjlcxyzvjfxbqwh | tr bcefhjklqvwxyz
Break a record = press = people hearing about it = more people using the browser
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.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
Any downloads AFTER the time will result in
"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.
Wow, modded troll for taking a stance against silliness? If Microsoft did this, everyone here would think this is a lame attempt at getting free advertising, which it is.
"Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies."
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.
24 hours is far less than a day?
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.
Prevent linux based DDOS's!
http://linux.denialofservice.org/
You'd figure after debian's SSL disaster, they'd know better than to arbitrarily change software to the point of not being able to use the product's name.
Calm the hell down. Is a browser. Nobody is getting killed over the wrong link.
Have you seen the source of the open source programs that you swear by?
I got "XML file malformed" and got it through another link. The wrong way to greet people who try to help you establish a record is to have your site cough up nothing but excuses after a long while of thinking up what reason you'll get for why you can't get the file).
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.
i am a soviet space shuttle
New features are great. That's one of the nice things about OSS. New features make their way into OSS projects faster IMHO. However forcing the use of a new and very controversial feature is not cool. It would be one thing if they added the feature and even turned it on by default if they wanted to give people a chance to use it. It's another thing to intentionally break support for the old way of doing it. That's rather vindictive in my opinion. We rail on other companies for doing similar things. Mozilla should not be excluded from our wrath simply because they're an OSS company.
I totally understand your use case, and why this change makes that task considerably more difficult. However, I'm pushing for this change based on the notion that all of the various people who have told me that Firefox is their favorite search engine don't scan a list of URLs, nor do they make a navigation decision based on the URL itself.
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). The developers' position is that Firefox should be morphed into a search engine. I thought the point of Firefox was to remove bloat and applications that don't belong in browsers. Otherwise, we'd still be using vanilla Mozilla. It almost seems like this dev thinks every browser should be its own spider and archive.org.
In this day and age, when you're up against the marketing millions of Microsoft, you have to play the game. You're absolutely right that the product comes first but they have to make a splash - their rivals do.
That's kind of what I'm thinking too. I really want the FF3 features, minus the awesome-cluster-of-a-bar. It irks me that an OSS project is pulling crap like this. I'm even a financial supporter of Mozilla. I helped pay for their massive NYT marketing campaign. Let me rephrase that: I was a financial supported of Mozilla. I don't really want to go to Opera but I might have to. I'm an old Apple guy so there's always Safari but I don't really want to do that either. I just wish that Mozilla would slap down the FF3 devs and make them take a different approach to this new feature.
Yeah, they don't make much sense. As far as the Awesome Bar goes, the address bar, location bar, URL bar is apparently no longer used for addresses, locations or URLs. Go figure.
db
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