Is Firefox 3 ready yet?

Firefox 3 ^ | 06.17.08 | perdogg

[Perdogg]

What happend? Was firefox bought by Boeing?? I thought it was supposed to be ready today.

[ShadowAce]

Firefox 3 powers to a smashing download record

Mozilla has succeeded beyond its wildest dreams, receiving more than its hoped for 5 million downloads of Firefox 3 in less than 14 hours. So for the first day of the new browser's life, it's onward to 7 million!

The download record period officially began at 11.16am US Pacific Daylight Time on Tuesday.

A pre-publication check showed the count had reached 5,079,227.

Since there is no existing Guinness world record for downloads, there is no specific number that must be reached. Organisers were hoping to at least exceed the 1.6 million downloads of Firefox 2 on its launch day, and that was reached in five hours.

"We are currently serving almost 9,000 downloads a minute, which puts us on track to achieve 5-7 million downloads our first day of general availability," said Mozilla's Paul Kim in the organisation's blog http://blog.mozilla.com/ at 3.26pm.

Hot spots accounting for more than 100,000 downloads include the US (over 2 million downloads), Canada, Brazil. the UK, France, Spain, Italy, Germany, Poland, Iran and China and japan.

Australia's doing well on a per-capita basis, with over 83,000 downloads.

The release of the new version seems likely to increase Firefox's market share. Mozilla's Blog of Metrics recently noted  "rapid adoption" of the release candidate along with continued growth of Firefox 2 usage.

According to Net Applications, Firefox (all versions) took a 18.41 percent browser share in May 2008, compared with 73.75 for Internet Explorer and 6.25 for Safari. Firefox and Safari have both been gaining ground at the expense of Internet Explorer. Opera has also improved its share by a healthy proportion, but is still a distant fourth on 0.71 percent.

Firefox has a particularly strong following in Europe. According to XiTi Monitor, its average browser share across Europe for March 2008 was 28.8 percent.

XiTi Monitor also reports that Firefox has a 31.2 percent browser share in Oceania, which includes Australia, New Zealand and the Pacific Islands.

Key features of Firefox 3 include a 'smart' location bar which adapts to user preferences, page display that's two to three times faster than Firefox 2, security improvements, and an add-ons manager. In all, more than 15,000 improvements have been made.

Firefox 3 is available for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux from Mozilla's GetFirefox site.

[CedarDave]

Downloaded it tonight; runs well.
Glad to hear it.

Most of my add ons where incompatible with Firefox 3.
Think I'll wait awhile before I download; give some time for the add ons to be updated.

Here are two that I feel are critical to using Free Republic and some other sites:

BBCode
BBCodeXtra

[zeugma]

I use Xinahere. I’m going to miss it until it’s upgraded :-(

[antiRepublicrat]

I did my two, one for Mac and one for PC. Both installed and worked flawlessly. Although of course for the Mac it was just open the image and drag Firefox to the applications folder to overwrite the old version (for which they give a nice shortcut).

[RayChuang88]

I'm using Firefox 3.0 right now and totally love it. However, installing Flash and Windows Media support proved more difficult than anticipated.

[Still Thinking]

Updated from 2.0.0.14 on two machines and can’t seem to download any addons. No matter which I pick it tells me the hash is wrong. I can’t believe all the addon XPI’s are corrupt, but it doesn’t say anything about version compatibility, just says the hash is bad. And the ones I’m trying to download are ones I’ve already downloaded on other machines while running 2.0.0.14. What gives? Is the hash calculator in 3.0 hosed? Anyone else having problems with this?

[ShadowAce]

From CBet News:

Firefox 3 suffers its first vulnerability

Less than one day after its launch, Firefox 3 has a vulnerability.

According to Tipping Point's Zero Day Initiative, the vulnerability, which it rates as critical, was reported within the first five hours of Firefox 3's release.

"Once the vulnerability was verified in TippingPoint's DVLabs and acquired from the researcher, the vulnerability was promptly reported to the Mozilla security team," said a representative.

Although the Zero Day Initiative team does not offer specifics until the vendor has a chance to patch it, the blog post did say this vulnerability, which also affects Firefox 2, requires user interaction and could result in an attacker executing arbitrary code.

Mozilla is reported to be working on a fix.

The Zero Day Initiative has been criticized in the past for paying researchers who find vulnerabilities.

Be careful out there, still people

[Wyatt's Torch]

Mozilla will have a fix out withing hours/days. Microsoft would issues SP1 in about 12 months...

[ShadowAce]

you got that right

[antiRepublicrat]

That was fast. Or is this like that Mac hack, where somebody already found a vulnerability and waited until a strategic time to release it?

[brityank]

Afterward, you can slowly double click the new desktop icon to rename it or remove the .exe.

To Rename a Shortcut, Right-Click then "Rename" and set your Shortcut's DeskTop Name; in my case -- FF

Simple and easier than "slow double click" !       :^)

[Quix]

THANKS THANKS.

Sometimes, when I click on a video . . . even from youtube, I get a sort of properties page or some such and I can’t find out on that page how to get to showing the video. There’s a login slot etc. and I filled that out right etc. still ended up back on the same page.

Doesn’t happen all the time. I don’t know what triggers it or how to get beyond it. I usually give up and open Explorer.

[antiRepublicrat]

Since many plug-ins weren't working I went looking for more and found there are just new versions to install that are compatible.

But, if you're on OS X You have to check out PicLens!

It will erase any doubts about the power that Core Animation can give to developers. It is truly cool -- CoverFlow for web content.

[SouthTexas]

Is this version the same as FireFox 3 Beta 5?

[RayChuang88]

The extension I have installed on Firefox 3.0 is easyGestures, which allows for browser navigation by pressing the middle mouse button to pop up a small browser navigation menu. It's a good replacement for Mouse Gestures, which is not available for Firefox 3.0 yet.

[InterceptPoint]

The bookmarks capabilities of Firefox work well.

Have you compared them to the method used by the del.ico.us plugin.

I really find it hard to believe that there is any way to improve on the beautiful scheme that delicious has for generating multiple link taskbars based on tags. For me it is the perfect solution to keeping track of the various categories of websites in a way that allows you quick and easy access to thousands of websites based on any categories that you choose to set up.

[ThePythonicCow]

I had played with Del.icio.us a little bit a year or two ago, before it had the Firefox plugin. From what I see of that plugin now, it looks pretty good. If I was in the market for replacing Foxmarks, I'd likely consider Del.icio.us.