Comments on: Firefox 3: New front in the browser war

With the era of rich Web applications now blossoming, the browser matters again, and Mozilla believes Firefox 3 has the edge over Microsoft's IE.

[livecrunch]

Yes I wrote about it too on my blog what time zones it will be available and where. I can't wait to download it . Hope their last bug fix was memory.

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[hyperwill]

i would have thought Firefox to have a larger market share. Firefox 3! yay!

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[The User]

Having been using FireFox 3 since its beta release, I am quite happy with what I see. Waiting anxiously to upgrade RC to the production version.

[g3 creative]

The designer types at G3 Creative love using FireFox and are awaiting the latest upgrade.

[Arrgster]

Just tested it, it's noticeably faster!!!

[Shankland]

My pleasure at its improved speed diminished somewhat after the plug-ins started arriving and degrading performance. The result has been that I'm more discriminating with plug-ins.

[Penguinisto]

Shankland: Agreed, though most plugins will likely speed up as their individual developers re-factor the things (or evne rebuild it for FF# in particular, instead of a quick patch to get it running in FF3). I trimmed mine back to three for now: one is a dark-colored theme, the second shows time zone diffs in the status bar (I keep in touch with folks in Asia a lot during a typical workday) and the third is AdBlock Plus.

[mgrey]

With the growing use of Firefox, I continue to be surprised by the number of sites that have not been coded for or tested under Firefox (i.e., the rendering with Firefox is poor).

[The_Decider]

Only an incompetent web designer codes for a specific browser.

[vmlenigma]

ZZZZZZZZ I guess someone forgot to turn on the Server that has Firefox 3, I have been trying to download it for hours now and only version 2 is available....what ever happened to June 17th?

[mgrey]

With the growing use of Firefox, I continue to be surprised by the number of sites that have not been coded for or tested under Firefox (i.e., the rendering with Firefox is poor).

Maurene Caplan Grey
grey-consulting.com

[sal-magnone]

I'm still seeing the mjority of FF installs on the computers of people in some way tied to the tech industry - either in it, publish for it, or are good friends or relatives of someone who is. Most people I run across either don't know what FF is or just use IE.

However, I do find allot of dead installs - I call them dead because I don't know where they come from. I suspect It installs them of course. Generally when a user installs FF he makes it the default. In most of these cases IE remained the default so as to not cause any problem. I also find huge FF installs in linux based grid clusters. At a major bank recently I found the cluster manager (the employee) writing a script to install FF on all ~2K blades in the cluster via downloading. I asked why should blade do a seperate download. He replied because it helps get the FF numbers up and [he] wants to "help". Nice.

I suspect there MAY be actually more regularly USED copies of Safari out there than Mozilla at this point.

Anyway, I'm willing to be convinced... really - I just don't see it.

[Penguinisto]

Err, as opposed to all those default copies of IE that never see the light of day (save for accessing windowsupdate.microsoft.com), right? I tend to find the opposite - that Firefox gets used, but IE is still there laying dormant on the OS (because there's no way for the tycal user to get rid of it and have it stay gone).

[Penguinisto]

Could the so-called bloggers please stop spamming your links in a desperate grab for hits? Thanks in advance.

[Penguinisto]

Incidentally... Windows (and even Linux) aside, Both of my Macs here @ home (yep - got an OSX install on bog-standard Intel gear going this weekend) use Firefox by default. I do it because FF is a personal favorite, and since I also use it on every other OS I work on and with, it just makes sense for me.

[Vegaman_Dan]

Awesome bar? You have got to be kidding me. You type in words and the browser returns a list of sites that contains that content or references to it. Um.... pardon me for my ignorance, but didn't Google do this a decade ago? I'm sorry, but this doesn't sound like a feature so much as a reviewer who simply didn't know what was in the browser already.

Yes, FF3 is an improvement over FF2, but then that's not saying much considering the wide spread ridicule that FF2 got for performance, reliability, and compatibility issues it had. Why do companies insist on trying to reinvent the web? What's wrong with expecting a browser to simply be a browser? It's when you start adding all this extra junk on here that your performance goes to pot- and another reason why veterans turn all of it off immediately in Opera, Safari, IE... and now in FF3. Just make a browser that works, guys, quit trying to shove features that we are going to disable anyways in our faces.

[Shankland]

Personally, I find the awesome bar vastly more useful than the location bar in Firefox 2. Re. "making a browser that just works," I find the awesome bar does in fact make the browser work better. Your mileage may vary.

I agree that there's an interesting tension is between the awesome bar and Google search, especially given that there's a Google search box right next to the awesome bar. However, for now and for most users, there's a major difference in results: the awesome bar results reflect what you've bookmarked and where you've been, so it's very personal. Most people don't have personal search turned on for Google, and even if they did, personal browsing history is a relatively small signal in the overall Google search results.

[Penguinisto]

Actually, I like it - it's like a mini-google, without having to go to the site first. I'm using 3.0 right now (Ubuntu users got it with their morning updates), and quite frankly, I'm not seeing any memory or performance drain at all (in fact, it seems a [i]lot[/i] snappier than IE 7 on the Windows box).

[Shankland]

Check back at 10 a.m. PDT for the download. (Though Mozilla warned me that's more their plan than a guarantee.)

[Penguinisto]

Already swamped. I'll try to hit it later on today for some of my other machinery (e.g. the laptop)

[Penguinisto]

Update: slow, but reachable now... :)

[ipv9]

The download period is scheduled to begin at 10 a.m. PDT.

[TotallyMadeUpName]

To Vegaman_Dan:
I don't recall the "wide spread ridicule" of Firefox 2 that you speak of. I seem to remember it being hailed as a vast improvement over the stagnating IE6. As the Internet becomes more and more a focal point of computer usage, "expecting a browser to simply be a browser" is an outdated concept. It's like expecting an operating system to remain text based.

To sal-magnone:
Browser usage statistics come not from the number of installs, but from the browsers used to access whatever web sites are monitored by the statistics gatherers. In this case I believe they used hits search engines to measure what browsers were used. I'm sorry that you and some bank's cluster manager didn't understand that.

[Penguinisto]

Agreed. The IT security community went gaga for it when it first came out, hailing it as a browser that's finally usable and not a big fat security hole (which IE demonstrably was, and in many respects still is). The only ridicule I ever saw came from the MSFT astroturf crowd and from MSFT advertising.

[michael.therrien]

http://www.mozilla.com/products/download.html?product=firefox-3.0&os=osx&lang=en-US (Mac)
http://www.mozilla.com/products/download.html?product=firefox-3.0&os=win&lang=en-US (Win)

;) Silly Mozilla!

[jture]

You have to wait until 10AM PDT, whatever time that is in your own timezone.

[ptzkiler]

The world's most popular browser just got better. Here's what you can look forward to
*Vastly increased rendering speed
*Improved memory management
*Support for more web standards(passes Acid 2 finally)
*Better bookmark handling
*Improved downloader
*Find's url's as you type them
*Better handling of addons/extensions

Also we can do what ever we want using Firefox
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[livecrunch]

1 more hour and download will start

[OlsonBW]

Vegaman_Dan

Apparently you don't read very well. The awesome looks at YOUR web history to see where YOU have surfed. Google doesn't do that.

[Vegaman_Dan]

Actually Google's toolbar can do that if you set up the preference for it. It just seems silly to have TWO search windows next to each other in the same window.

Think of it from the end user's view point. When they go to search for something and are faced with two separate search options there,both with nonsense names (unless you've used both products before, the newbie won't konw that these mean ' search'). That sort of needless complication and confusion can't help things.

Luckily FF isn't meant for end users- it's for tech geeks. It always has been and always will be. :)