Your mission: Download Firefox 3
Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to download and install Firefox 3. It was just released today and it’s awesome. I can say that with some certainty because I’ve been using and marveling at the version 3 Release Candidate for a week and a half now. One of Firefox 3′s new features, the Awesome Bar is a large part of what makes Firefox 3 so awesome (what, you didn’t think I was merely being hyperbolic, did you?). The Awesome Bar is the replacement for the old-school Location Bar, with a lot more features that make browsing even more convenient.
And I don’t want to rush you or anything, but you really should download Firefox 3 as soon as you read this. The Mozilla Foundation is trying to set a World Record for most software downloads in 24 hours, and the clock runs out at 13:00 EDT on June 18. Having the World Record for most software downloads belonging to a Free Software project would be an amazing argument in favor of Free Software, so please, pitch in!
So, whether you’re upgrading from Firefox 2 (a painless process), or making the switch from the evil and nefarious Internet Explorer, there’s never been a better time to download the latest version of Firefox.
June 17th, 2008 at 17:27
I’ve been running it since RC2. Presumably, it’ll update the next time I restart it.
It kind of explodes if you try and run Pandora, though. I’m talking 500MB of memory consumption kind of “explodes” here. It doesn’t do that thing that Fx2 did, though, where it would randomly lock up on a Flash video and peg my processor at 99%.
June 17th, 2008 at 21:19
I’m posting this from Firefox 3 on my home box (OS X 10.4), and I really like it so far. The acid test for me, though, will be when I start using it at work, where I usually have at least 12-15 tabs open at a time (e-mail + RSS feeds + enwiki watchlist + whatever work project I’m doing). Unfortunately, that’ll have to wait until the construction is finished in my office. :(
June 17th, 2008 at 21:44
jeem: The acid test for me is the acid test.
Okay, I couldn’t resist that one. From what I’ve heard, FF3 has really good performance when many tabs are open, and from my experience with it so far, I can vouch for that being the case. I think the days of memory-leaking Firefox are finally behind us.
June 18th, 2008 at 13:10
If they were serious about going for the record, they should have handled this launch better. There was no countdown, the thing was only available at random and inconvenient times if you weren’t in the US instead on the actual “download day”, and they should have mirrored the hell out of the their sites because they got hammered yesterday. It took me two hours just to get through to a download page. D:
But I did download it twice, once at work and once at home. I’d been on one of the RCs prior. :P