17 Jun 08 _ Get Firefox Yet?
By casey
in Casey's Corner, Development, News and Events
Today is the big day! Obviously, all of you are aware that Firefox 3.0 was released at 1:00 pm, EST today, and that Mozilla was eyeing the Guiness Book of World Records record for most downloads in a single day, right?
Sure!
Well, the point is, if you haven’t yet: get Firefox. As a Mac user, I am blown away by the improvements in speed and memory management in 3.0. I honestly did not enjoy the Firefox 2.0 Mac experience, and used Safari as much as I could. Windows users on the other hand, should already be using Firefox (boo, Internet Explorer), and 3.0 should be an upgrade.
The Firefox download site was down earlier today (did they not expect the traffic?!?) but we managed to get access by the end of the day. I couldn’t wait that long and used BitTorrent to download what turned out to be an Italian version of 3.0 (I’ve sense switched back to English).
I’ve already stated my initial reactions. The new look is great, too, it really opens up some more screen real-estate, which is something we always wrangle with as designers.
Compatibility-wise, there are updates availble for the Google Toolbar, Web Developer Toolbar, and the YSlow Firebug extension. Firebug itself has a beta that works with 3.0, but the Firebug site has been down for the past few days. You can find a mirror that has the code and a list of Firebug mirrors here.
Other than that, I’ve been enjoying the new experience. I’m sure other AWP-ers will chime in over the next few days.
Did I mention boo Internet Explorer? (explanation of previous link).
June 17th, 2008 at 9:02 pm
Casey: I’m was in the middle of writing an epic blog post here when my old Firefox 2.__ crashed. Not cool.
Luckily (since WordPress is overly-cautious) my auto-saved post still exists.
Booo old Firefox, too.
June 18th, 2008 at 1:04 am
I downloaded Firefox 3.0 as well. I’ve been using the beta (some were really buggy), so it wasn’t all that big of a change for me.
When the Mozilla site was down it forced me to find a mirror too, but luckily it was in English! Thank you random FTP uploads!
A good Mac alternative to Firefox is Camino, which is made by the Firefox creators, Mozilla. I’ve tried Camino a few times, but I’m just so used to Firefox that I keep going back.
June 18th, 2008 at 9:00 am
Yeah, I used to use Camino, too. I can’t remember why stopped using it, probably because Google Docs started to support Safari, and I saw no further reason to keep using a ‘zilla-based browser at that point.
Firefox 3 seems fast enough that it may usurp my previous Safari-centric lifestyle, which is great because Google Gears is Firefox only.