[thelist] FireFox 3

[Symeon Charalabides]

>  Firefox 3.0 Record Download Attempt Crashes Mozilla Servers
>  Mozilla hopes to successfully complete 5 million downloads of the Web
>  browser in 24 hours and set a Guinness World Record.

Their HTTP servers crashed for a while, but their FTP servers were up constantly (if you knew how to get to them). Currently, they are pushing the 8 million mark (!) and still have an hour to go.

>  I was about to go get it. Maybe I will wait. Does it import your
>  bookmarks/favorites from 2.0?

On my machines (WinXP), it automatically picked up *everything* from 2.0: bookmarks, add-ons, settings, even add-on settings. It was just like updating your firefox version, only you had to manually install it.

>  Do all the plug ins we know and love have new
>  downloadable versions that are compatible with 3.0?

Web-developer toolbar & Gmail Manager worked right off the bat.
FireFTP, DictionarySearch, HTML validator, YSlow it found & downloaded new, compatible versions.
FireBug and Rankquest SEO toolbar are still out - I would expect FireBug to be available very soon.

>  Virtually none of the addons/plugins work (not unusual, just
>  irritating.) Plus, it overwrote my old version without asking or telling.
>  (Was that the default before? I don't remember.) 

I think (though I'm not certain) it did the same when upgrading from 1.x to 2. That was a bit presumptuous of them, all right.

>  Some of the default behaviours are incredibly annoying. I start typing my
>  own web address in the address bar, and instead of going to the history and
>  matching me letter by letter, it does some random search as if it as
>  suddenly become smarter than me.

Here, I don't know what you're referring to. When I type anything in the address bar, it displays the history dropdown, which is further refined the more I type. Just like it used to do, only now the history items are as

<title>
<URL with highlighted type matching what you have typed>

>  Overall look and feel fairly screams "Look! We're turning into Internet
>  Explorer!" I do not want to re-learn the browser from scratch after I've
>  spent two years customizing it to behave exactly as I wanted it to.

Again, I don't agree with this.

Regarding the look and feel of the browser, nothing has moved around - everything is exactly where it used to be. It certainly looks a bit more Windows-y, but it's the Windows crowd these people are trying to penetrate. Although I don't feel I'm making any sacrifices by using FF3, I'd be happy to readjust to the new look and feel (if I felt it required any readjusting) if it meant more widespread adoption of a standards-compliant browser.

As for customised behaviour, FF3 picked all my setting from FF2, so most, if not all of, your customization should be there already.


Symeon Charalabides (cosmopolite trainee)
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http://www.systasis.com