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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.
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 don't understand this obsession of ram usage, and this is from someone with a laptop with 512MB's, and primary computer of 844MB (as reported by the OS, but 1GB in the official specs). But, I want my RAM to be used (if it's going to make performance better). That's why I have it. So sure, if you have memory problems I can see the concern. But I'm comfortably running VMWare and firefox (using 172MB atm) and I probably have less RAM than you.
I guess, what's ultimate is a program that can scale its memory usage depending on availability. But I don't have any problems, so I won't complain.
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.
That's a PEBCAK error, not a fault with Firefox.
Images, html, css, content, media.. all of that takes up space. Firefox has to hold it in memory so it can display it quickly when you click on the tab.
How much would you be complaining if you had to wait 5 seconds every time you switched tabs so it could swap in from disk?
Why do slashdot use obscure timezones like PST EST XST when there is a standard UTC?
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.
I for one will not be downloading Firefox 3 until this record attempt is over. I think it's just plain silly.
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."
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.
I think the right term in this case is "Worlddotted", wasnt just a slashdot frontpage link.
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.
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/
Have you seen the source of the open source programs that you swear by?
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.