Well, i have the developer edition of IE8 which includes a IE7 emulate button that is quite interesting. Although IE8 brings many pages up quickly, most financial groups don't recognize it so i get the warning about unsupported. But if i click the "Emulate IE7" and return again then i'm permitted to logon to bofa.com. As of last night, my ff3 updated itself to rc2 and went smoothly. After comparing the two, I'm still a Firefox user by choice of preference.

As before, all my Add-ons are working OK. Don't notice that much of a difference in speed between Firefox 2 and 3, not without getting the stopwatch out anyway. I think you guys are imagining it, still as browsers go this is pretty good. We'll just have to wait and try Bills beta in August to see which is the best. I know IE8 will always gets a fair and honest review here, and you lot won't even need to try it first before posting.

I know IE8 will always gets a fair and honest review here, and you lot won't even need to try it first before posting.

*laughs*

To check speed difference, open up 50-100 windows and/or tabs, set FF to open up the windows/tabs from last time, and file->exit. Open in FF2 and it will probably take a minute or two to completely open the windows up and have everything resolve... FF3 will finish it in a significantly shorter period. :)

Working well, google needs to get off of their asses and update browser sync this is ridiculous.

It's not an official "versioned" release. Many addon devs simply don't bother with these.

That said, check out Mozilla Weave for syncing. Haven't had a single issue with it.

Try Fox Sync.

I stopped using themes when the upgrades (1.5 or 2.0) kept breaking.

This is Mozilla's achilles heel. The extensions and themes are great features, but they still have issues getting them compatible for upgrades.

??

They are not responsible for the add-ons. They have zero control over the add-on's compatibility.

If they went Nazi" on the addon devs to require some strict set of functionality or methodology, we'd lose a large number of addon devs.

Most addons are compatible within days of an official version, and immediately with a point release (many do not bother with betas or RCs, but that's somewhat understandable, at least, IMO).

It sucks, I agree. I avoid (or try to) betas and RCs because of it. I fail to avoid it most times (like this release), but to me, it's worth the frustration. If it isn;t worth it for you, skip the release until a few days after the official final and all should be well. :)

Or just use Nightly Tester Tools to make it think they're compatible, see if it breaks anything, and if it's fine, keep using it. :) That works also.

Worked just fine with XP. Now for the acid test, will it work with Vista.

FF 2 was a piece of turd endorsed by the usual folks who put up with compromise just not to run MSFT products.

FF 3 is actually very cool. A lot snappier and tight on resources. I guess if you load it up with tons of extensions there may not be much difference but fortunately I don't need more than 2 or 3. This might actually become my default browser (replacing ie7pro).

With most of my extensions still not working in this latest release, I have to say, I won't be upgrading to 3.0 when the final comes out if this stays the same. Allot of people are flipping out over this new version. I don't see much change at all. If anything, I find the new Bookmark arrangement annoying. The other improvements are minor. And there isn't much of a speed difference. Speed is mainly dictated by your connection. I even went back to last summer of trying Netscape 4.7 and found that wasn't much slower than any of the newer browsers out there.

There is a massive speed difference if you work with 3+ tabs. Firefox 3 is javascript multithreaded, 2 isn't. The speed difference is readily apparent on every system I've tested it on, from Athlon 2500+ to core 2 duo 6600.

Wow, this is excellent. The built in update system handled this for me so no need to download it separately.

I have been using 3.0 since beta 1 and its great to finally see extensions all come together now. If you use this for as your main browser then try ie7 or ff 2.0 again its painful.

(originally blue in the early public betas, now green)

I thought they differentiated the different versions by making them blend more with the OS that they were installed on now. For instance, I noticed that the default theme for RC1 when installed on Vista had blue Back and Forward buttons, and when installed on XP they were green.

EDIT: Build 2008052906 on Vista has blue buttons still... for what it's worth.

You are correct. (In fact, I think they might have originally been green on both XP and Vista.) During Firefox 3 developement, they added run-time OS-version-detection ability so that themes could use different images, such as the back/forward buttons here, depending on the OS version.

For what it's worth, they also added a DOM event (I think that's how it was implemented--in any case, they added it) that fires when the application becomes active/inactive, so a theme can also now use different images for those states. This is needed with the new theme on OS X, as Firefox "fakes" a Leopard-like appearance, and chrome in Leopard is turns light gray when inactive. (In the foreground, it's the iTunes-like darker shade.)

Just a few things they've done for greater visual integration with the OS lately.

Does anyone know if TMP works in rc2? I'm kinda lazy to find out on my own. Previous releases didn't even work with nightly tester.

http://tmp.garyr.net/dev-builds/

Last one in the list is the latest build and it works in RC2.

Sweet, TMP works!

Rereading again, this may *become* the final RC2 build, but if it hasn't passed the QA yet, which it hasn't, according to both the article and Mozilla's own timeline below, then it's not technically been released yet as an official RC2.

That should happen sometime tomorrow.

>-(

Does anyone have an address at hand to get my dogs excrement routed to SF3?

*laughs*

They do have a habit of jumping the gun on FF releases. I think this is the third time they've done it (it's really only bitten them once, though when Mozilla pulled it from the FTP servers).

Lesson: Nothing on their "nightly" FTP servers is final until they officially update their website and release schedule.

Official release site for RCs:

http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/all-rc.html

Release Schedule:

http://wiki.mozilla.org/Firefox3/Schedule

I really want to hear from Scott on this. It is possible he's spoken with the devs and they have guaranteed him that *this* build is final. (Though it still wouldn't be an "official" release.)

It has passed QA, it just hasn't put up on the mirrors or set up for distribution yet. A check of the release schedule at

http://wiki.mozilla.org/Releases/Firefox_3.0rc2

confirms this.

Good find. It does indeed (looking at one page up and checking the QA results) look like it's passed all of QA (Build1 for Windows, Build2 for Linux/Mac).

Looks like they'll make it official tomorrow still, though.

Just found it odd BN was announcing the release when the article itself stated QA was still in progress and none of the sites had been updated.

ftp://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/releases/3.0rc2/win32/en-US/

Well it's in the right spot...

Guess this is the first time i´m thinking about uninstalling FF.
Since version 3 I don´t like 50+ MB Database thing - okay i deactivated the phishing thing etc. But the straight connection to Google...
And evertime I open FF it writes into windows update log...
Maybe I wait unto final version - but the love died.

BTW: I´m using external protections, so I don´t need adblocker, antiphishing etc

Last week, Firefox developers were privately notified that an RC2 release would be necessary in order to address a new slate of bugs detected in RC1.

???

Last week a meeting was held where they decided, due to two outstanding bugs, to go with RC2. Every other RC2 generating bug had already been squashed and committed. Hardly what anyone would call a "slate" of bugs....

...from: http://wiki.mozilla.org/...atusMeetings/2008-05-27

"most bugs for this RC have landed, waiting on bug 398332 and bug 435362"

Edit:

This article may have jumped the gun.

Estimated release schedule (RC2):

* Code complete: Wednesday, May 28, noon PDT
* Hand to build: Thursday, May 29, 6am PDT
* QA begins: Thursday, May 29th, noon PDT (as builds become available)
* QA signoff: Thursday, ***June 5th***

The current RC releases site:

http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/all-rc.html

...still lists RC1 as the latest RC. The installer is also named differently than their last official RC release.

This looks like a release candidate candidate. That's not redundant at all, is it? ;)

Scott, have you verified this through official channels???

You can manually edit the download URL from saying 'rc1' to 'rc2' and that seems to work

It does indeed.

http://download.mozilla.....0rc2&os=win?=en-US

...and you get a properly named file.

Still not what one would call an Official Release though. (QA testing still in the works and all...)

Thanks for the linkage, though. Have you tested it? Is it the same build as on the fileforum?

(Build for link above: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9) Gecko/2008052906 Firefox/3.0)

how did you change your font?

That bit towards the bottom is the code tag.

[code] blah [/code]

i could of sworn thats exactly what i did earlier. i got it to work this time.

I think the download is official. Mozilla started making unofficial nightly builds pop up a big warning the first time you start them up that they are not official beta or RC releases.

No issues. I've been testing for 5 minutes. :)

lol 5 minutes.

Here it is about a day later and still no issues.

Is google toolbar compatible with Firefox 3.0 yet? *Before you say it I like it because I can paste an address in it and it will go straight to it. This keeps my address bar from getting cluttered with a bunch of random links.*

The address bar in FF3 is different anyway. It's not just the addresses you've typed in, but it is much smarter than that. Google "Awesomebar" (the fantastic new name for it) and you'll get looks of good info.

lol
lame
any more questions on spyware compatability?

Being able to use the same bookmarks in IE and FF on different computers is quite handy too.

no, it doesn't work btw