Any minute now, the Mozilla Foundation will officially release the third incarnation of their successful Firefox web browser – the browser that cracked Internet Explorer’s monopoly and forced Microsoft to improve IE. Mozilla aims to set a world record in most software downloaded in 24 hours with Firefox 3. Update: It’s out there, boys and girls. Update II: And the Firefox 3 page is up too.Firefox 3 has a list of improvements and new features. Mozilla sums them up as such:
Firefox 3 sets the innovation bar very high with exciting new features, including one-click bookmarking, the smart location bar and lightning fast performance.Keeping you and your personal information safe is our top priority. Firefox 3 includes phishing and malware protection, plus our new instant site ID info.
With features like built-in spell checking, session restore and full zoom, Firefox 3 makes it possible to work faster and more efficiently on the Web.
Your taste and needs set you apart from the rest. With Firefox 3 you can choose from over 5,000 add-ons that help you customize your browsing experience.
The awesome bar improved over the course of the various test releases, from a rather unclear mess to something where entries’ details are highlighted according to importance. The awesome bar still has a nasty habit of favouring the wrong links over the right ones, but it has been getting better with each test release. For instance, with older releases, typing in “web” would give as a first hit some online store with “webobjects” in its url that I visited once, instead of bringing up “webmail.student.vu.nl”, my university’s webmail which I visit several times during the day.
Performance-wise, Firefox 3 also appears to be a major stride forward. Firefox 2.0 was a memory hog, and slow to load upon first boot. Firefox 3 feels more like Safari in that it loads almost instantly, and loads pages faster too.
Firefox 3 has not been released yet, but we’ll update this item with the relevant links once it has. It’s out there, boys and girls. And the Firefox 3 page is up too.
Well, seems a pretty good marketing idea for spreading Firefox usage, but if this is a “true” Guiness world record objective, how they gonna count _real_ downloads?
It’s easy to fake this kind of results. I bet that someone will write a 2-lines bash script using wget
That doesn’t matter. The record doesn’t state that people have to use the software. It’s just the *number of completed downloads* and that’s it. Sure, setup a bash script to download it all day long, it’s still legal as far as the record goes. Just make sure you use the bouncer URL (from the home page) so that you get a different mirror each time and it counts toward the record. (downloading direct from FTP does not)
Edit: I’m wrong
“In order for our attempt to be legitimate, each download must be human initiated.”
Although, I don’t know how they’re going to filter the result into an accurate number. IP logging, sure; but you can’t be 100% accurate. How are Guiness to verify the record?
It doesn’t matter, as long as the conditions are equal for everyone attempting to break the record. Every attempt to break this record can be equally messed with by script kiddies, so the net result is the same, and as such, the script kiddies can be discarded.
Conditions equal for everyone would mean the same size of userbases. And different type of users within each userbase in exactly the same proportions.
But that simply isn’t the case.
Edited 2008-06-18 01:27 UTC
That’s antiquated… only windows users still have to download software by hand – Linux users use their package manager
ok package manager are also human initiated but still if they only count people clicking a download link that won’t do it.
Probably can limit the count from the same IP?
No practical,
1. they should save the million IPs that downloaded the app.
2. If I’m behind a very large subnet, I should be unable to download firefox because someone inside my subnet already did it.
1. saving even 100 million IP addresses is easily practical. especially if the requests are spread over several mirrors.
2. If your network is using some form of NAT, then 2 people will still be able to download, but it may only count as 1 download towards the guinness record.
Can’t wait.
An astonishingly good piece of software.
And I don’t just mean using it to browse-
Developing with it has been a joy.
I’ve pushed it to the limits that I desire; Acid2/HTML5 and it can sing my praises for it, itself:
http://camendesign.co.uk
The CSS rendering is gorgeous. Rounded corners, layout, typography. It is rare for software to be lovable, but Firefox has all the right qualities, evident from the love that went into engineering it. Internet Explorer will never be able to have that.
Developing for it is indeed fun stuff. What’s aggravating is taking that same document, opening it in IE6 knowing that the vast majority of your users will never upgrade and only have what came out of the box.
Vast majority of my users?
‘I don’t use IE. I don’t use Windows as my primary OS. I don’t even care what Windows people do. This is my personal website, so why should I cripple my code trying to solve their problems?’
IE users are not my concern. They are not even my “target market”. I’m writing about the latest web developments, targeted at geeks.
“The standards have been around for over 10 years.
Using an incapable browser is your problem, not mine.”
Wow, that is gorgeous; have you thought about making it available as a Blogger template?
I’d love to see a marketing promotion which is along the lines of, “this is what you’re missing out on” – show all these cool things that the web can do, then at the end, “too bad you’re running Internet Explorer” and then provide a link to Firefox.
All the code on that site, PHP included is free for you to use in any way you want. If you want to make a Blogger template, you can; but I’m not going to do it myself. I wrote that code as an example of art, and cutting edge HTML/CSS.
http://camendesign.com/?200805241404
Edited 2008-06-18 06:36 UTC
Just not advertised yet…
http://download.mozilla.org/?product=firefox-3.0&os=win&lang=en-US
For those of us that already have the RC installed, will you be prompted to update to the final version, or will it assume that RC3 (Mac) is the latest and not prompt you? I know, for me at least, with 2.0 , I had the latest RC installed and that was considered the final version because I didn’t have to update until 2.0.1 was released.
It may. If it doesn’t, you’ll stay on the Developer-Release branch, meaning that you’ll get auto-prompts for the alpha/betas of Firefox 3.1 / 4. Downloading and installing the 3.0 final will put you on the major release branch and will only receive auto-updates for public releases.
According to the FAQ found here…
http://www.spreadfirefox.com/en-US/worldrecord/faq
An update will not count towards the record. Download a complete version from http://www.getfirefox.com.
They also claim, to answer other questions, that “In order for our attempt to be legitimate, each download must be human initiated.”
You won’t get an update, because 1) RC3 was the actual release (that’s why they didn’t actually put any RC numbers inside the app, just the file name); 2) automatic updates aren’t out yet, that comes a bit later. Happens with every release.
How long will it take to get into the FreeBSD ports tree? I thought about installing Firefox 3 while it was in beta because it was getting good reviews, but the ports tree is still at 3.0.a2_3,1
Probably in a week and then spend another day compiling it
(if there are no issues)
We have newer Firefox (rc3) in MC ports and ports-stable modules. Yesterday, I have been work for several hours to move from ports to ports-stable and sync’ed with FreeBSD ports tree. I think it’s ready for me to give a headup sometime today and ask users to test ports-stable module in MC. I just need to clean up in ports module first.
The reason why firefox-devel is out of date in FreeBSD ports tree is that it forces us to bring in newer cairo, poppler and pixmap. These are required to be test first to make sure these ports don’t break other ports. A lot and lot of ports depend on pixmap and cairo, so we have to be caution. Keep your eyes in freebsd-gnome@ mailing list for one of our headup when ports-stable module is ready if anyone doesn’t want to have GNOME development (2.23.x) from ports module.
When will Firefox 3 merging into FreeBSD ports tree? Well, depend on how our test process goes well (when it’s done).
ports module = Firefox 3 stuff and GNOME developement
ports-stable module = only Firefox 3 stuff
Thank you for the information. I do not use the GNOME desktop, but my system is gtk-based using Fluxbox, so I just need Firefox. I have lived this long without Firefox 3 so I can survive a few more days/weeks before it gets into the ports tree.
You can already download it, I’ve got a mirror up at http://www.devrandom.us
While I really like a lot of what they’ve done with FF3, the marketing speak from Mozilla is rather obnoxious.
[quote]Firefox 3 sets the innovation bar very high with exciting new features, including one-click bookmarking, the smart location bar and lightning fast performance.[/quote]
One-click bookmarking and smart location bar are not innovations anymore. “Fast” performance is never an innovation.
I really wished Mozilla was better than that.
They did set the bar high as far as quality of features and User Experience goes, so why not focus on that instead of the obnoxious marketing speak?
Downloaded 3.0, installed, updated some plugins, and it asked to restart. Window disappeared… and nothing happened. Waited 30 seconds, no hd activity. Popped up taskmanager, saw firefox.exe sitting at 80% cpu usage.
Browser that crashes before I can even visit a web page with it doesn’t exactly inspire confidence…
I had the same thing happen with the Opera 9.5 beta unfortunately
I’m pretty sure some of the files it needs got corrupted somehow.
Edited 2008-06-17 15:28 UTC
80%!!….
Wow…. must be running in 1080p h.264 mode…heh
Strange really, considering the stability of the betas and release candidates. I’ve not had a crash yet with beta5 on Ubuntu Hardy..
Yeah… core 2 duo 2.8 ghz on win 2k8 enterprise 64bit.
Second (and third) crash: Had a tab loading a page that for whatever reason is not responding. Instead of giving me a 500 or whatever it brought down the whole browser. Restarted it, and it loaded up that tab again, same thing happened. Restarted a third time, closed the tab, and its back to normal
FF3 needs perhaps new Mozilla Profiles to run really stable.
Everyone thats having problems try to start firefox with -ProfileManager Parameter and choose to create a new profile. That should help
a bit of a pain (takes awhile to get everything the way i want it), but ill give it a shot. thanks for the advice
Perhaps you should try without the plugins before going too far. Much like Windows drivers, it’s usually the add-ons that gum up the works, not the software itself.
The time the download count is set to start is 10:00am PDT (19:00 CEST):
http://wiki.mozilla.org/Releases/Firefox_3.0
Edited 2008-06-17 16:09 UTC
its 10:00am PDT now and looks like the mozilla servers are down already
The schedule is for when the announcement was to be made, not when the downloads were to be switched.
both getfirefox.com and mozilla.org is just going empty right now. either the server is being hammered or its down just to get ready for the deluge…
Some “time” that’s not advertised as UTC/GMT? On the internet age?
Well, why wait if you could see a “Page Load Error” right now? (true)
Seriously… I’m not seeing enough infrastructure to this… I hope they have it in some hours…
heh, if they really wanted, they could try going internet time: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swatch_Internet_Time
http://releases.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/releases/3.0/wi…
From the link above you can work your way to any language you need.
http://www.getfirefox.com
Http/1.1 Service Unavailable
Looks like the only thing they broke was their server.
Persistence is the key. Geez.
It took a “long” time to download, hitting a low of about 12 KB/sec. as reported by Firefox 2.0.0.14 on my machine and I don’t remember seeing it about 37 KB/sec.
They may get the record, but they might create a lot of bad PR in the meantime if people think that the burdened servers in any way correspond to the quality of the software.
the site, http://www.spreadfirefox.com, is timing out,it is running like treacle. I wonder if it has died under the weight of people trying to download, or has another “browser producer” initiated a DNS attack on their servers ?
the current number is 578,429,948, I personally do not believe this number is accurate
I will put on my freshly polished tinfoil hat and ponder this quandary some more……..
Edited 2008-06-17 17:58 UTC
They sent out the “pledge day” emails about 1 hour ago, but the site they link to at http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/?p=downloadday does nothing but talk about how great Firefox 2.0.0.14 is.
Oh, looks like they’ve just changed the site to at least have screenshots of 3.0, and talk about its features, and link to downloads of… 2.0.0.14.
I get 2.0.14 too ;(
They make great browsers, but they _SUCK_ as admins. This whole download day thing has been handled _very_ poorly IMHO
It all just seems very ill prepared to me.
Now it’s updated (and works)… yeah. +1 download.
But i got it finally. now if you have a Windows, Linux and Mac os, you have to go download a copy for every OS that you have.
Nope…
Don’t like it.. since the early versions, the RCs, and this one, it’s just not worth it.. Too different, more complicated, too much like the new IEs, and just.. well, not a simple browser anymore.
But congrats to them anyway.
I’ll stick to Safari, Konqueror, and Opera, which also has a new version recently.
Edited 2008-06-17 19:23 UTC
It looks practically the same on the surface to me. The new features are there if you want them but they certainly don’t get in the way.
I feel better now that I’ve read someone doesn’t like it either. I tried it and although it seems faster than FF2, I don’t like the interface: it looks/reminds me of IE7 which I despise because of the horribly designed interface. Why did FF choose to put the “back” history arrow on the “fwd” button? Oh yeah, because the “back” history is related to the “fwd” button. How foolish of me to not see that.
So, just like you, I have dumped FF and switched to something else, which for me is Seamonkey.
I’ve been using FF 3 for something like a month now (started using beta 5 when I installed windows 2008), and I felt the same way as you at first. But now whenever I go back to my laptop running FF 2, I notice how all those little details really have improved FF3 and wish my distribution would hurry up and package it. I really miss the speed of FF3, and even the new placement of buttons and the awesome bar. I recommend giving it a try for a little while and seeing if it doesn’t grow on you like it did on me.
Also, that history dropdown menu’s placement does make sense; it’s the full history, both forward and backward. So if you have some pages available forward in your history, your current page will be in the middle of your dropdown list. On the windows theme at least, the dropdown arrow is contained inside a sunken area containing both the forward and backward buttons to hint that it encompasses both forward and backward history.
I see what you mean by the Windows version having both buttons included in a sunken area – never noticed that and it does make sense. I guess I am just used to the history arrow being by the back button, not the fwd button. When I saw how similar FF3 was to IE7, I got upset because it LOOKED like IE7 and I couldn’t figure out why on earth an Opensource project would even attempt to make something that looked like IE7.
I have to admit I am used to using IE7, only because I have no choice at work, but I wanted FF to be different…
The history containing both fwd and back entries made sense the way you explained it: the list is kind of like a ladder, the top is back, and the bottom is fwd, with your current page in the middle, right?
Anyway, I guess I should try it again to give it a fair chance instead of having a knee-jerk reaction. Thanks for the reply, appreciate it.
It’s not a back history button any longer. It goes both ways, when you’re in the middle of your progress. The “keyhole” bit looks more than a bit odd, but it’s all whatever. The Mac OS X people did us a favour, though. The forward/backward buttons still give the list, if you hold them down, even though the Windows version doesn’t do that any longer.
I just tried it, and if you right click either button you get the same menu as the drop-down menu as a context menu, which is a more common technique than holding a button down, at least on OSes designed for people able to use 2 mouse buttons
. Oddly it gives you the full menu, including both forward and backward pages, no matter which button you right-click on.
I think its a little white lie that it was released today, when RC3 was released on the 11th, and is the same build. I guess its what your meaning of the word “Release” means…
Working on Sid it just upgraded to RC3 and I haven’t run enough on it to see if that glorious:
This obnoxious crap from RC2 is still in RC3 whether I run iceweasel/firefox-bin or epiphany-gecko
Note: Bugs have been filed.
sys:1: Warning: value “((GaProtocol) 2)” of type `GaProtocol’ is invalid or out of range for property `flags’ of type `GaProtocol’
ERROR: ld.so: object ‘/usr/lib/libartsdsp.so.0’ from LD_PRELOAD cannot be preloaded: ignored.
ERROR: ld.so: object ‘/usr/lib/libartsc.so.0′ from LD_PRELOAD cannot be preloaded: ignored.
** Message: GetValue variable 1 (1)
** Message: GetValue variable 2 (2)
** Message: GetValue variable 1 (1)
** Message: GetValue variable 2 (2)
** Message: GetValue variable 1 (1)
** Message: GetValue variable 2 (2)
** Message: GetValue variable 1 (1)
** Message: GetValue variable 2 (2)
** Message: GetValue variable 1 (1)
** Message: GetValue variable 2 (2)
sh: acroread: command not found
sys:1: Warning: g_hash_table_unref: assertion `hash_table != NULL’ failed
** (epiphany-browser:16312): WARNING **: Exception in gr::RangeSegment
** (epiphany-browser:16312): WARNING **: Exception in gr::RangeSegment
** (epiphany-browser:16312): WARNING **: Exception in gr::RangeSegment
** (epiphany-browser:16312): WARNING **: Exception in gr::RangeSegment
** (epiphany-browser:16312): WARNING **: Exception in gr::RangeSegment
** (epiphany-browser:16312): WARNING **: Exception in gr::RangeSegment
** (epiphany-browser:16312): WARNING **: Exception in gr::RangeSegment
** (epiphany-browser:16312): WARNING **: Exception in gr::RangeSegment
** (epiphany-browser:16312): WARNING **: Exception in gr::RangeSegment
** (epiphany-browser:16312): WARNING **: Exception in gr::RangeSegment
** (epiphany-browser:16312): WARNING **: Exception in gr::RangeSegment
** (epiphany-browser:16312): WARNING **: Exception in gr::RangeSegment
** (epiphany-browser:16312): WARNING **: Exception in gr::RangeSegment
** (epiphany-browser:16312): WARNING **: Exception in gr::RangeSegment
I wish FF3 for Windows looks as good as it does on the Mac.
Yuck! FF3 was severely overhyped. New OSX skin is horrible, and if you change it, the scrollbar disappears.
Now what’s wrong with the theme? Mac users complained that it looked like a Windows application but now that it looks more like Safari, people don’t like it either. Uggggh.
I happen to like the way it renders pages. Anything else is secondary but the anti-phishing and anti-malware are nice touches also, since Safari has neither.
Also, I wonder about the Windows version. I can see that it’s changed but the performance seems about the same. The Mac OS X version is so improved, it’s difficult to believe that a single line of code has been left untouched.
Thanks to all the developers responsible.
installed it over an RC. Everything seems a bit faster, but maybe that’s because Greasemonkey and Adblock aren’t working yet. Bare-bones Firefox is always faster, but I’ll stick with 2.0 until these plugins are updated.
I don’t like the awesome bar. I think it takes up too much vertical space. Probably get used to it, though, as it seems to copy the address bar in Opera somewhat.
The lack of a go button is very annoying. I enjoy the command-line, but I like to surf with just the mouse. And having to hit enter in the address field to “go” is annoying. Refresh isn’t the same.
One annoyance, not related to the Firefox team, is the plugins. Why haven’t the Adblock and Gresemonkey teams released FF3 compatible plugins? They’ve had months of lead time, release candidates and daily builds for testing purposes. I believe this is a major flaw in open-source software distribution. I’m sure to some it looks like a feature, to me it’s a bug. When these small, sharp tools are part of a gestalt, they cease to feel that way when everything is so out of sync. Instead everything feels as if it’s on a sliding scale of brokenness, with little guidance as to what versions work together.
I would really like to install plugins and themes and not have to restart the browser. When I have 100+ tabs open, I like to not have to reload them. I close my proxy temporarily, which helps, but I shouldn’t have to go to the trouble.
I think the Firefox team has done a good job of not breaking anything major in this release on Win32 (other than the plugins, which is per usual). I don’t see anything compelling that forces an upgrade except for the memory defragmentation and performance boost in gecko. It feels almost as fast as Opera. I can’t wait to see some perf stats.
I didn’t like the awesome bar at first either, but I now do, especially being able to just start typing words from the title of the page to get it to list them. Being able to click the star for quick bookmarks is great for sites you want to temporarily bookmark to remember to check back later, like if you’ve left a comment on a blog you don’t visit regularly. There is a “go” button, but it only appears (as a blue arrow on the right-hand side of the address bar) when you change the URL (by typing), which kind of sucks since I had gotten used to being able to middle-click the go button to duplicate a tab, and that doesn’t work anymore.
I don’t know about regular ad block, but ad block plus has been working in Firefox 3.0 since at least beta 5 and maybe even earlier. I also see that greasemonkey is listed on addons.mozilla.org as supporting Firefox 1.5 – 3.0 since at least June 12th, so I’m not sure why it’s refusing to install for you. I’ve found that being sure to always install an extension through addons.mozilla.org is the best idea, as it seems to allow the auto-updater to get compatibility updates that aren’t available if you add an extension directly from the extension’s website.