AfterDawn: News

Firefox 3 gets off to a late start but hits the ground running

The long anticipated release of Firefox v3 came today as expected, well almost anyway. Initially there were problems caused by a massive amount of traffic. With a little bit of work the servers were feeling better and the official attempt at setting a world record was on.

Granted the record has never been attempted before, so they technically could have quit after the first download and still gotten the record, but there was a more important goal at stake. The launch of Firefox v2 saw more than a million and a half downloads on the first day. Developers were anxious to surpass that by a wide margin, and it looks like they've done exactly that.



According to an update on the Mozilla developers site, "Thanks to overwhelming demand we’ve passed through 14,000 downloads a minute! This will put us well into the tens of millions of downloads in a 24 hour period if we can sustain it. Each download is about 7MB so that’s around 13 Gigabits/s of just download traffic."

Get your own copy of Firefox 3 from one of the official download sites.

Written by: Rich Fiscus @ 17 Jun 2008 20:04

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• 30 comments

• tripplite

  meh...i never felt a difference with the new updates...but perhaps this is a breakthrough???

  17.6.2008 20:26 #1

• rvinkebob

  Doesn't feel too different other than some obvious changes, but Firefox is Firefox and you can't go wrong with an update!

  17.6.2008 21:32 #2

• RichieTD

  Looks nice, feels nice. Took me ages to download it but was worth it. 7mb on a broadband connection just shows there has been a lot of traffic.
  
  The only downside at present is the may add ons I had donot work. Have to wait for add on updates. At least NoScript was still runnning.

  17.6.2008 21:39 #3

• chaos_zzz

  firefox is so great that if Ie and firefox traded places nobody would download IE

  17.6.2008 21:52 #4

• SProdigy

  A few visual tweaks, and a major difference in speed, both in loading the app and rendering pages. Most of my add-ons worked. My love for FF continues!

  17.6.2008 21:59 #5

• jony218

  I've been using Firefox for 2 years for the security and because I got tired of my internet explorer homepage changing every week. Firefox was always slower than IE, but not anymore. I notice the difference right away, the speed alone is worth the install. Highly recommended to everyone.

  17.6.2008 23:52 #6

• amf0802

  I tried it out for a few minutes and didn't notice anything spectacular. I had my firefox v.2 tweaked to optimal performance and that may be why I didn't notice a big different. But none of my add-ons worked except my weather, and my favorite theme didn't work so I reinstalled v.2

  18.6.2008 00:03 #7

• fgamer

  Didn't know it was released today.

  18.6.2008 02:06 #8

• Bucknekid

  Originally posted by amf0802: I tried it out for a few minutes and didn't notice anything spectacular. I had my firefox v.2 tweaked to optimal performance and that may be why I didn't notice a big different. But none of my add-ons worked except my weather, and my favorite theme didn't work so I reinstalled v.2Same here, I tried it, most add ons were a no go, theme, speed no different, so I went back to 2.0.0.14 Just going to wait until the add ons catch up and any future new release bugs are worked out.

  18.6.2008 03:31 #9

• pensfan12

  If people want speed maybe they should get Opera 9.5
  It owns IE and Firefox.

  18.6.2008 04:07 #10

• svtstang

  Just got it, and......it is more of the same :p Besides minor graphical tweaks and some plugin issues, it is the same ol' firefox I know and love.

  18.6.2008 06:10 #11

• Mik3h

  Actually there have been some major internal changes like memory and processor optimization.

  18.6.2008 06:44 #12

• venomX05

  tons of changes...best one i like is the drag pic feature, picked it up before the changed the main site page, and when using it at work it was pretty cool, still haven't see everything it has to offer, but hopefully with v3 someone for the love of god should kick in a active x app...lol, can't listen to my dc 101 ggrrr :P

  18.6.2008 07:47 #13

• 7thsinger

  Picked it up last night. Didn't fool around with it too much, did not some obvious interface tweaks; other than that haven't seem too much of a big difference. But, it's FireFox and it's an update.
  
  Happy Here!

  18.6.2008 08:25 #14

• susieqbbb

  Safari 4.0 is faster and quicker than firefox 3 even for a developers version it is quite fast it makes firefox look like a door stop.

  18.6.2008 11:08 #15

• simpsim1

  I've been playing around with the betas for a while now, so the release of the final didn't really herald anything that I hadn't already seen. That said, I've already noticed a few of the bugs have been ironed out.

  18.6.2008 12:10 #16

• navi1199

  Just downloaded FF3 and so far so good, makes this a lot easier book marking sites and tagging them, also i like how you can save and quit a site before you exit, something that opera has... all in all you really can't expect a huge difference in a web browser, for me safari loads just as fast as ff3... all i can say though is that ff3 is def. faster than ff2.

  18.6.2008 13:13 #17

• A_Klingon

  Hi.
  
  I'm probably way out of date on this, and I haven't kept up-to-date BUT.....
  
  Didn't I read somewhere here that the good folks at Mozilla & Co. sold out all their interests (Firefox and Thunderbird) to Microsoft anyway??
  
  If so, then Firefox isn't Firefox anymore - it's merely IE #2, and Firefox is the de facto reason WHY people dumped IE in the first place.
  
  Can someone confirm Mozilla's sellout to Microsoft for me? I sure hope I'm wrong about this.
  
  I still use FF ver. 2.0.0.14; it works great; no complaints; why screw with something that already works fine??
  
  - Thnx -

  18.6.2008 16:29 #18

• JRude

  <Fake Sites Insist Microsoft Bought Firefox >
  http://www.informationweek.com/news/inte...cleID=193700190
  ;- )

  18.6.2008 17:33 #19

• JRude

  Google; microsoft buys firefox
  Get a lot of entries...including M$ jokester entries!

  18.6.2008 17:54 #20

• ferguj1

  Downloaded Firefox 3 yesterday and I have to agree with the majority, not a huge change. Like some of the things like easier adding of favorites but I had already made some tweaks for speed based on another forum so I can't see much difference there. One thing though for some reason it keeps my processor maxed a large part of the time, wondering if anyone else has had this issue or knows of a fix. Will probably go back to V2 until I get it figured out.

  18.6.2008 19:04 #21

• rvinkebob

  Uhh, does anyone know why it keeps using the hard drive every two minutes. It lasts for about 40seconds and Firefox literally freezes in that time. I turned caching completely off, disabled every thing imaginable, used safe mode, uninstalled and reinstalled, tried on a whole different computer, tried to defragment the hard drives... and nothing seems to remove this severe bug. I reverted back to FF2 for now seeing as it works much better at the moment.
  
  EDIT: The HDD usage causes the FF to go up in memory usage as well... about 2MB per time it loads from/to the hard drive. I left my computer with FF3 on for an hour and the memory usage rose to about 187MB in task manager. I only loaded 4 websites with two tabs left open. Weren't they suppose to lower the amount of memory usage in FF3?
  

  
  

  18.6.2008 21:38 #22

• ferguj1

  rvinkebob, your problem was very similar to mine. Even when I reverted back to Firefox 2 it was acting unusual, so I ran Advanced Windows Care and made sure to wipe out all temp files and settings. Things now seem to have returned to normal at least while I continue running Fx2.

  18.6.2008 22:32 #23

• rvinkebob

  I cleared everything manually so FF2 was back to normal to begin with. I searched google and there's a multitude of users with this exact same problem. No real problem solver out at the moment but we can always wait for good 'ol FF 3.0.0.1 :P
  

  
  

  19.6.2008 00:35 #24

• Xplorer4

  For those wanting extensions to work on FF3, just get the Nightly Tester tools add on which can make all your add ons work for FF3, but it may cause some bugs. Not in my case latley but in the past it did.

  19.6.2008 03:52 #25

• A_Klingon

  Originally posted by JRude: <Fake Sites Insist Microsoft Bought Firefox >
  http://www.informationweek.com/news/inte...cleID=193700190
  ;- )Thank You, JRude! for that info!!! :-)
  
  (I've been away for a while, or I might have caught that one).
  
  I may do the FF-3 thingee now.
  
  Much obliged !! -- Klingy --

  19.6.2008 12:42 #26

• theclint

  safari kill ie and firefox but i still have love for fire fox because safari dosent have that much add on about 10 to be exact and they try to make you pay for some of them

  24.6.2008 17:46 #27

• JRude

  ut oh...RealPlayer browser recorder plugin does NOT work in Firefox 3! Went back to FF2 until Real gets off it's butt! :- 0

  24.6.2008 21:52 #28

• simpsim1

  Originally posted by JRude: <Fake Sites Insist Microsoft Bought Firefox >
  http://www.informationweek.com/news/inte...cleID=193700190
  ;- )Heh Heh!!! You gotta just love this bit......
  Originally posted by Above Link: Another feature claims that "Visiting the following sites using MS Firefox 2007 will cause your computer to shut down unexpectedly," then lists examples such as Google (NSDQ: GOOG), iTunes, Apple, and Yahoo (NSDQ: YHOO). The final item on the banned list: "Any sites with the phrase: microsoft/windows/explorer/vista/bill sucks." Or if you go to http://www.msfirefox.com this one's great....
  Quote:Tired of slow image rendering? Microsoft Firefox 2007 can deliver online pornography at blazing fiery speeds. By using a proprietary dynamic algorithm, anything that remotely resembles a tit or a boob will download up to 10 times faster!
  PMSL!!
  

  My opinions come with no warranty whatsoever, but are totally open-source, so you can reverse engineer or decompile them as you see fit. All other rights reserved.
  
  "Freedom" in the west consists of: Freedom of speech, freedom of opinion and freedom of movement. So why is it then, that people want to know what youre saying, what you think of them and where you are going?

  25.6.2008 04:02 #29

• pmshah

  I downloaded FF 3.0 on the very day it was supposed to or trying to break the record. Did not have any error messages & the downloads went smoothly.
  
  Although most extensions that I use are compatible or have updated versions for FF3 the one I use the most - i.e. IDM integration will not work & for that reason alone I have a second window open in IE. I simply copy paste the url & it works BETTER. The plugin for IDM in Firefox allows either only a single url or ALL on the page to be added to the IDM queue IE allows selected urls to be added to the que and above else checks the validity of the links.
  
  I will be reverting back to FF 2.xxx over the weekend but will continue to use the IDM integration feature on IE.
  
  Anybody listening at Mozilla !!!!!

  26.6.2008 01:04 #30