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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.
Download
be downloading FF!
IE 5 is good enough for me!
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.
Here is how to get more or less the old behavior. Go to about:config and set browser.urlbar.matchOnlyTyped to true and browser.urlbar.richResults to false. Then restart.
sudo apt-get install firefox-3.0
Ubuntu Hardy has it as the default Firefox browser.
For those who still don't know, Mozilla is trying to enter GUINNESS
for most software downloads in a 24-hour period. Check it here:
http://www.spreadfirefox.com/worldrecord/
Everybody is asked to participate by downloading one single copy of
Firefox 3.0 today, June 17th!
ONLY FULL DOWNLOADS ARE CONSIDERED!
So, go to the Firefox site and get one FULL COPY!
http://www.getfirefox.com/
If I clone myself, can I call it a thread?
If a girl winks to us, can I call it a race condition?
When I go to the site I get:
The connection was reset
The connection to the server was reset while the page was loading.
And this was with FF 2.0.0.14, so they can't blame my client.
Do not meddle in the affairs of sysadmins, for they are subtle, and quick to anger.
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.
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.
That one post has probably trashed their attempt to break the record for most downloads in one day.
Now, everyone on slashdot will have downloaded it before the official 24 hour download period even starts.
Well done.
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
Actually, at the current exchange rate 0 Euros is a few bucks or so.
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.
in Justin Mason's view, some pretty annoying times of day for many parts of the world
Sure, I can see lining up at my daughter's GameStop store at midnight, considering that whatever game they want may be sold out quickly.
But a download? Who cares what time of day it's available? If it's available at 1:00 AM your time, then just start the download when you wake up, or when you get home from work.
They're not going to run out of Firefoxes, you know. Relax.
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
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?
No?
I didn't think so. That's why the memory footprint is being made a big deal of...
Did you forget to enable High Memory support in your kernel?
Processor type and features --->
High Memory Support (on) --->
(X) 4GB
I'm not a prophet or a stone-age man,
I'm just a mortal with potential of a super man.
Sure, but how much smoke do they have?
HTH,
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
Why do slashdot use obscure timezones like PST EST XST when there is a standard UTC?
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.
> It literally POPS off the screen to say "Hello, please click me!".
Where the hell did you buy that monitor?
25% Funny, 25% Insightful, 25% Informative, 25% Troll
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.
No. 1 PM EST would be 2 PM EDT.
"Spring forward. Fall back"
I agree that for a world wide product such as Firefox, UTC would have been the proper time frame to use.
"Insanity is doing the same thing over again expecting a different result."
Heathen! It _should_ say "About Iceweasel". You Ubuntuers and your impure software practices!
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.
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.
The product I make displays documents of tens of thousands of pages with color content at 600 DPI, flips pages practically instantly, and uses less than 20 megabytes of RAM while doing so.
Crappy code is no excuse.
Pedantic alert. There is no such thing as 12 PM (or AM for that matter).
Actually, there is. Though I daresay that the US gov't printing office has a really strange idea of how it should work...not really - the original post on mozilla says it'll be available at 10 AM PDT - i'll assume that's correct. slashdot managed to change this to 10 AM PST (technically 11 AM PDT) despite the fact that most of the US is on daylight savings time.
and, as many other posters have pointed out, all should have used demarcations of time that are not mostly US specific.
The site seems to be bogged down for some reason...
life is a tragedy to those who feel, and a comedy to those who think
As of FireFox 3.0b3 browser.urlbar.richResults no longer works. The ability to chose your own search results style was removed by the Mozilla developers as part of bug #407836. They're illogical viewpoint is explained in bug #403159.
And, for the record, Oldbar does not fix the problem. It does not disable the searching style introduced by FF 3.0. It only makes the results look a little more like 2.0.
According to this article browser.urlbar.matchOnlyTyped no longer works either. The value of browser.urlbar.matchOnlyTyped is now ignored.
It's not the GP's fault either. Dozens of articles have been published in the past few months that have old, outdated information. Even Redhat put it in their Knowledgebase on 6/4. The sheer number of articles attempting to help people disable the "awesome bar" should make the developers realize that this is not a "feature" that everyone wants. I agree with the GP. I too HATE the awesome bar. It's a shame too because I would love to have the fixes for the memory leaks in FF 2.0 that don't exist but FF 3.0 addresses anyway.
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 servers, the servers, the servers are on fire.
The servers, the servers, the servers are on fire.
We don't need to download let the motherf***ers burn.
Burn motherf***ers, burn.
I believe they will attempt the world record for the largest, willing, Distributed Denial of Service Attack.
:)
Well, what the hell, lets help bury their servers
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
That's odd. The performance I'm seeing is far better than any other browser I've used, and it hasn't crashed in a couple of weeks of heavy use. The memory footprint is improved and the UI response is much faster. This is including a dozen or so extensions. I'm a little bit confused by what you mean when you say IE8 outperforms FF3. Is it memory usage? (IE under-reports because it rides the coattails of explorer.exe.) Is it loading speed? (IE is faster because it rides the coattails of explorer.exe.) Is it rendering speed? I haven't seen anything to suggest that IE8 is any faster than other IEs, and it still has some nicely broken CSS issues.
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"?
http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/outages.html
This is the link to FTP site: ftp://releases.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/releases/3.0/ Not sure if downloading from here will contribute to the counter.
Here's what mozilla is saying from their ftp server site: ftp://releases.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/releases/3.0/mac/index.html We're not quite ready yet! We're just as excited as you are for our upcoming release, but we're still putting the finishing touches on Firefox 3: preparing the new mozilla.com website, getting our severs ready for downloads, and doing our final pre-launch checks. You can follow our progress if you'd like! The files in this directory are - for now - only meant to be used by our testers. Downloading them directly can harm our ability to distribute Firefox efficiently, and will also not be counted as part of our attempt to set a Guiness World Record for the most software downloads in a day. If you'd like to be notifed the minute that we launch, please go to sign up for Download Day. Or just head over to getfirefox.com on Tuesday, June 17th after 10am PDT.
The idea of having the largest one day download was a Microsoft hoax designed to create a DOS attack on Mozilla.
Keep hitting that "refresh" button to try and get to the Download site. I'm pretty sure that will help out the slashdot effect!
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
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/
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.
Sorry people - I meant to hit DOWNLOAD, but accidentally hit DOS ATTACK.
Boy is my face red.
This is including a dozen or so extensions. I'm a little bit confused by what you mean when you say IE8 outperforms FF3. Is it memory usage? (IE under-reports because it rides the coattails of explorer.exe.) Is it loading speed? (IE is faster because it rides the coattails of explorer.exe.) Is it rendering speed? I haven't seen anything to suggest that IE8 is any faster than other IEs, and it still has some nicely broken CSS issues
Interesting you ask, as I just read an article that came away with an initial impression not unlike our own testing.
http://www.crn.com/software/208403208?cid=microsoftFeed
As for IE8 performance... I mean (Load Time, Page Load Times. high content performance on the page, RAM usage, responsiviness, etc.) The difference between IE7 and IE8 is significant, and IE7 wasn't so bad... (IE8 has rewritten everything from script handling, to page composition, etc.) If it wasn't from MS, it would be a browser people would be proud of in terms of performance gains.
You once again falsely state that IE rides on the coat tails of explorer.exe, this myth needs to die, as this has not been the case since IE6, especially on Vista, where explorer.exe and iexplorer.exe share NOTHING, so it doesn't get a footprint break as many assume because of IE4 Win98's shared process model where Explorer.exe and IE literally shared processes.
In fact even IE6 only marginally shared DLLs with Explorer.exe on XP, and still kept them in their own memory space, consuming just as much RAM as if explorer.exe was involved. (Test yourself, kill explorer.exe, iexplorer.exe doesn't die, and RAM for IE don't change and hasn't since Win98.) (NT doesn't even technically allow for what Win98/IE4/IE5 was doing.)
IE7/IE8 run are not tied to anything, and get no 'shared' benefits. Even in Vista, HTML rendering in folders is not an option, nor Active Desktop (the original desktop WIdgets from Win98). The HTML rendering frameworkis a 'callable' part of Windows, but if these threads/process call it, they get the RAM load, etc, and this not shared, just as if another application used the Mozilla engine, it would still have to load it in its own application space.
So people still claiming that 'IE has advantages' because of 'shared' resources/RAM with Explorer.exe/OS are just spreading a very old myth that needs to finally die, starting here.
Check out the link above, even though it doesn't seem to be a comprehensive test, it hits were are initial reactions are too.
http://blog.mozilla.com/blog/2008/06/17/firefox-3-coming-soon/ "The outpouring of interest and enthusiasm around Firefox 3 has been overwhelming (literally!). Our servers are currently feeling the burn and should be back to normal shortly. Download day will officially commence once the site goes live. The 24 hours period will be clocked from that moment. Thanks for your continued support." Posted by Melissa Shapiro There we have it... We helped slashdot Mozilla. :P
Julie Moult is an idiot.
Sites been down for awhile. Maybe the Mozilla team can get the Guinness Book of World Record's "Most effective self inflicted denial of service attack."
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