Slashdot Mirror
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.
Does this count towards the World Record Attempt?
This is my opinion. To make sure you don't steal it, it's covered by the DMCA.
Will my FF 2.0.0.14 automatically get updated to FF 3?
Love me or leave me. Hey, where's everybody going?
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.
Reviewing just the first hour of video games.
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'll take you in a Hunt deathmatch any day.
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:
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.
Find free books.
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.
"You can either have software quality or you can have pointer arithmetic, but you cannot have both at the same time."
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.
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/
{{.sig}}
After hitting refresh a couple of times, I get http://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.
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?
// as if it were a search keyword? After some uses you'll have this behavior habituated and won't notice it.
// 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?
How about prefixing your searches with
I use the search bar for searches. I use the URL bar for URLs. So, why would I ever type
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.
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
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.
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.
Launch every sig.