Like many in the Internet-connected world, I was eagerly awaiting the arrival this week of Firefox 3's "official" beta, Release Candidate 1. But not so eager that I wanted any part of Tuesday's scrum. Oh, as a promotional gimmick, creating a new world's record for "Most Downloads In A Day" is a good one [although Guinness, the traditional arbiter of such matters, currently has no such record posted]. I just had a sense that the chaos [I've always wanted to name a cat that, by the bye. There are days it fits one or more of The Woman I Love's and my three cats] of hundreds of thousands [actually, an estimated eight million] of downloads couldn't be good for Mozilla's servers*. [It wasn't. Delays, crashes, and mayhem were the order of the day. Sounds like Chaos the Cat, doesn't it?]
Therefore, I went to the download site Wednesday morning, after work, encountered no delays [the FF3 .exe file downloaded in under three minutes, using broadband connections], had an easy instillation ['wizard'-driven install], and was able to look over the thing in a matter of minutes [after putting down the leftover cereal milk for Chaos, sorry, Buddy. The other two felines are Malachi and Webster. If I can figure out a clever way to do it, I'll tell you about all of them in a future post. Otherwise, just accept that those are the cats' names. Move on. Don't dwell on these otherwise meaningless asides].
I didn't have a huge amount of time to look over the new browser. But I did notice it really is faster than FF2 and its descendants. It has a clean look, and, as usual, add-ons/extensions are quick 'n' easy to install [one problem of using open source, and allowing just about anybody to develop new functions for the Fox, is that a lot of those extensions aren't yet updated to work with FF3. But I expect this will be sorted out quickly. You'll have the chance to find out what does and doesn't work during the installation process; those extensions that work are automatically carried over to FF3].
Should you drop your current browser for Firefox 3? I dunno. I use IE 7 at work, and Firefox at home. Is one noticeably better than the other? I dunno. Do I believe Firefox is less-likely to be virused [is that a valid verb?] than IE? Oh, yeah. And, like just about everything I recommend, it's free. Worth the experiment, if you have any uncertainty about your current browser.
-Mike Riley
* Riley's First Law - Unless there is a limited amount of a desired item, picking it up on Day 2 is perfectly acceptable.
3 comments:
Just call me scrum. :P I got mine on D Day.
I'm very disappointed that they STILL have not fixed that thing with cookies. It is still not saving my logins. FF is the only one that screws this up. Flock too but Flock is a FF clone. I've begun using an old Netscape at times cause I hate typing in logins and passwords over and over and over.
L-
Yeah, repetitive typing is not only boring, it can lead to carpal-tunnel [I drove through the Carpal Tunnel once, by the bye; it was pretty repetitive, and my arm hurt afterwards].
There are some free log-in/password filler programs out there [tho I can't think of one at the moment]; have you tried one of those? Has anyone else? How did it work? Let the three or four people who darken our door know. Please?
-MR
FF3 did a number on my bookmarks. I am still trying to figure out what happened. I have noticed it seems to run faster too.
I would take the worst Firefox version over IE 7 any day though. Maybe with Bill Gates out of the way they will start putting out better products.
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