Firefox 3 goes gold on June 17th

Mozilla has just announced that Firefox 3.0 will finally be released on June 17th after 34 months of dev time, and they are trying to get as many people as possible to download it over a period of 24 hours to get into the Guinness Book of World Records. Look, don't do it. If you're anything like me, all your add-ons and themes will break and you'll spend weeks being irritated by it until add-on developers slowly lope along to make their stuff 3.0 compatible. You're better off waiting a few weeks.

[#1 posted by mujadaddy , June 12, 2008 9:52 AM]

You're better off waiting a few weeks.

Indeed. This goes double for iPhones ;)

[#2 posted by yer_maw , June 12, 2008 9:57 AM]

Great. Memory leak 3 is out. Fuc*ing amateurs.

[#3 posted by TheGilmanator , June 12, 2008 10:08 AM]

Or you could set extensions.checkUpdateSecurity to false in about:config.

Just be aware you might open yourself to security holes if you download extensions willy-nilly.

You'll probably need to do this for things like Greasemonkey, which is way behind the times.

[#4 posted by TheGilmanator , June 12, 2008 10:11 AM]

Sorry. Not extensions.checkUpdateSecurity. Try extensions.checkCompatibility instead.

[#5 posted by Silence , June 12, 2008 10:18 AM]

Of the 47 extensions I have installed (sheesh, I didn't realize I used so many until I counted!), only 7 non-critical ones haven't already been updated for Firefox 3. And at least one of those makes low-level Firefox API calls necessitating a more extended debugging process. Make of that what you will.

[#6 posted by hokano , June 12, 2008 10:19 AM]

Waiting a few weeks is good advice. Record, schmecord. We are not the Mozilla Foundation's marketing monkeys.

[#7 posted by hokano , June 12, 2008 10:25 AM]

Though I suppose I could download and not install to help them get their record if they really want it that bad.

You gonna finish that banana?

[#8 posted by gabrielm , June 12, 2008 10:30 AM]

So let me get this straight...

They create and continually update a great product and then offer it for free to you. All they ask is that you download it next Tuesday to help give the project a little PR. Quit your whining and help out a little!

BTW - just because you download doesn't mean that you have to install. Not that there is much of a reason not to. I have been running the beta for weeks and the thing is solid.

[#9 posted by Anonymous , June 12, 2008 10:49 AM]

If you subscribe to Netflix, and want to watch their streaming movies, you should already have downloaded Firefox Version 3. There is an "internet explorer" add-on that blazes past Netflix's Internet-Explorer-only policy. But you already knew that.

[#10 posted by w3bjunkie , June 12, 2008 11:21 AM]

Here's the link to the campaign initiative Firefox is running. Total pledges to download, so far, are 1,111,135!!

http://www.spreadfirefox.com/en-US/worldrecord

[#11 posted by srt19170 , June 12, 2008 11:36 AM]

You'll probably need to do this for things like Greasemonkey, which is way behind the times.

Or not:

http://arantius.info/gm/

And see:

http://lifehacker.com/xml/comments/395269

[#12 posted by w000t , June 12, 2008 1:13 PM]

I'm with hokano, I'm downloading it. Firefox/Mozilla.org deserves such an accolade as much or more than any other potential winner. But notice I don't say I'm installing that day.

And hokano, that's not a banana...

[#13 posted by WeightedCompanionCube , June 12, 2008 1:14 PM]

wait, you're not running it already? RC2 is rock solid.

[#14 posted by scjody , June 12, 2008 2:18 PM]

Actually, those of us running Ubuntu 8.04 have been (sometimes inadvertently) beta testing 3.0b5 for a few months. All my extensions work - delicious was the last one and it was updated yesterday.

[#15 posted by michaelportent , June 12, 2008 8:57 PM]

I'm on the Beta right now, and it's lovely. It has finally solved the one thing IE7 had on it, opened 4 tabs in both, same websites, and Firefox 3 uses less memory.

So, not only does it render all the sites the way they're intended to be rendered, but it does it in a lightweight fashion.

[#16 posted by Al Billings , June 12, 2008 11:39 PM]

Have you actually checked that your extensions won't be updated before spouting off about it? Most of the important ones have already been updated due to a concerted effort to get developers to do so. Fact check?

[#17 posted by Simon Greenwood , June 13, 2008 2:20 AM]

I've been using it for months on my Macbook and since Ubuntu 8.04 came out on my dev laptop. I got home last night to find that was an RC3 for OS X - is this a Mac only thing? Meanwhile if you run Ubuntu faithfully with Synaptic, RC1 was released last week...

[#18 posted by Graham Anderson , June 13, 2008 10:00 AM]

RC3 is still crashing for me on Mac. It seems to be a Print > Save As PDF bug that has been around forever.

[#19 posted by WeightedCompanionCube , June 13, 2008 3:25 PM]

scjody - Ubuntu (and Red Hat) pushing FF3b5 out was a big mistake. It was already outdated when they did so. There are cooking handling bugs in b5 that break the stuff I develop, and I've been able to reproducibly kill the whole X server just by loading a large page, dumping me back out to the login prompt. Now THAT'S a crash!

[#20 posted by Anonymous , June 18, 2008 6:22 AM]

Nightly Tester Tools
problem solved.