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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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"?
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.
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.