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June 12, 2008 8:53 AM PDT

Blame the Mac for Firefox's Release Candidate 3

by Matt Asay
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Mac freak that I am, it is with shame that I admit that it's all Apple's fault that Mozilla had to issue another Release Candidate for Firefox 3. No, it won't have any impact on the final release date, which is still scheduled for June 17. But it makes me ashamed that the Mac, and not Windows, had the last-minute problem.

Sniff. Sniff. There. Now I feel better.

As for any of you out there who have yet to download Firefox 3, please do so. Now. Yes, you can wait until Tuesday for the final release, but if you're still languishing in Firefox 2, you really owe it to yourself to upgrade to 3. Even in beta it's amazingly better than 2. Super fast. Great UI. Etc.

If all open-source projects could be like Mozilla...there would be no more proprietary software. John, Mitchell, and comp...err, Foundation: How about it? How about giving us a better email experience? Oh, wait. Already doing that. How about a mobile browser? Check that one, too. What about taking over IM? Aha! Found one that you hadn't thought of yet.

Matt Asay brings a decade of in-the-trenches open-source business and legal experience to The Open Road, with an emphasis on emerging open-source business strategies and opportunities. Matt is vice president of business development at Alfresco, a company that develops open-source software for content management. He is a member of the CNET Blog Network and is not an employee of CNET. Disclosure. You can follow Matt on Twitter @mjasay.
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by jrepenning June 12, 2008 10:52 AM PDT
How about "protect plug-in API backwards compatibility, so FireBug and YSlow would still work"?
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by asadotzler June 12, 2008 11:38 AM PDT
Add-ons are not like plug-ins. Add-ons can change _anything_ about Firefox. All of Firefox is the API which means that you couldn't change _anything_ about Firefox without risk to at least some add-ons.

That's the power of add-ons, without which, the collection of useful features (over 5,000 of them to date) would be much, much smaller. See IE and Safari for examples. They both have mechanisms for making add-ons/toolbars/etc. but there's just not much there because developers cannot evaluate and hook into the code however they want.

The good news is that about 80% of the most popular add-ons will have been updated by the time we ship Firefox 3 and that should include Firebug.

If you can't wait on Firebug, you can get a Firebug Beta now that mostly works (I've got no problems with it) in Firefox 3 RCs. It's available at the Firebug blog http://www.getfirebug.com/blog/

- A
by angrykeyboarder June 12, 2008 1:23 PM PDT
How about promoting "Download Day" instead? :)
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About The Open Road

Matt Asay brings a decade of in-the-trenches open-source business and legal experience to the Open Road, with an emphasis on emerging open-source business strategies and opportunities. Matt is general manager of the Americas division and vice president of business development at Alfresco, a company that develops open-source software for content management. He is a member of the CNET Blog Network and is not an employee of CNET. Disclosure.

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