If you've been holding your breath waiting for Mozilla to release the final build of Firefox 3, you might want to take a break before you pass out. It looks like we're going to have at least one more release candidate before Firefox 3 final is released.
Firefox 3 RC2 will likely be released sometime in June. The update will address several dozen bugs found in Firefox 3 RC1, including one widely reported bug that can cause Firefox to essentially render some Linux systems temporarily unusable.
We won't know whether there will be a Firefox 3 RC3 until some time after RC2 is released and beta testers have had a chance to kick the tires a bit. For the most part, Firefox 3 RC1 perfectly usable. It renders many pages faster than Firefox 2, has vastly improved bookmark and add-on managers, and has a multi-purpose location bar. But if you're not the sort of person who likes to rely on beta software (or release candidate software as the case may be) for day to day usage, you may want to wait another month or two or more until Firefox 3 final is released.
[via Mozilla Links]
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
5-28-2008 @ 1:52PM
Nik said...
I've been using FF3 since B5, and have never run into any problems. Perhaps many of the bugs are for powerusers...
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5-28-2008 @ 1:56PM
l337sp34kr said...
I was a little upset that my Firefox 3 RC1 kept crashing on my Mac. Turns out FF3 RC1 and Application Enhancer (ShapeShifter, FruitMenu, WindowShade) are not best friends. I hope FF3 final will be. Until then, I'll stay on FF2 which still works fine and is APE friendly.
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5-28-2008 @ 2:11PM
Jeebus said...
Why are they using beta testers to test RCs?
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5-28-2008 @ 2:12PM
Brad Linder said...
By beta testers, I mean anybody who downloads and uses pre-release software. While a release candidate is technically not a "beta," that's only because somebody's decided to give it a different name. If you're looking for stable, bug-free software, (ha!), you probably shouldn't download anything called a release candidate.
5-28-2008 @ 2:19PM
Jeebus said...
Was I being too subtle?
5-28-2008 @ 2:39PM
EnOne said...
I'm not surprised I still have issues when I right-click on bookmarks and try to view the properties of a bookmark, sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't, sometimes it is grayed out.
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5-29-2008 @ 7:59AM
Damian said...
I know which bug you mean, can't remember the number sorry. It's not a show stopper, might be fixed in Firefox 3.1.
There's a lot of bugs in right clicking the bookmark menu, but 99% of people will never notice them. The goal is to launch a highly usable product, not a perfect one, you can much more actually done if you're realistic.
5-28-2008 @ 5:48PM
Samuel said...
It's not easy to keep ones nerve with a project deadline, going over it to my mind leaves me in great anguish. I feel for the developers, I know their doing a sterling job, myself I've only ever released one piece of simple software and any delay would make me unhappy.
From my side I can only imagine how frustrating it must be to keep people waiting. Still, its nice to have people to wait for you, not that my app got much attention:
http://lovelago.googlepages.com/home2
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5-29-2008 @ 8:04AM
iuqiddis said...
I have been using firefox RC1 for a few days now. For the most part its stable. A couple of times it randomly crashed as I closed the broswer, so my foxmarks plugin didn't get a chance to sync, but I can't reproduce that error. Other than that I'm loving it. It's faster than than firefox 2 when it comes to loading pages, and seems more responsive. The RAM usage is still high though.
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5-29-2008 @ 8:06AM
alienvenom said...
Per http://wiki.mozilla.org/Firefox3/StatusMeetings/2008-05-27#Round_table it suggests that RC2 will actually be released today (2008-05-29) not in June.
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5-29-2008 @ 10:54AM
edward said...
Haha their map is broken, cursor hides the first digit in countries with shorter names like Canada and Russia.
I wonder if they will make a better spell check.
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