Mozilla says Firefox 3 ready for prime-time | Hacker News Reader

Mozilla says Firefox 3 ready for prime-time

reuters.com

24 pointsparker19 comments

Key rivals to Firefox are market leader Microsoft's Internet Explorer and Apple Inc's Safari browser.

It doesn't bode well for Opera when they aren't even included in the list. I'm not even an Opera user, but why doesn't Opera get more love? They have some critical flaw in their browser? Or is it just because it's not the default of a major OS?

I do really enjoy that the browser wars got started again because they are now development platforms. Shows that a seemingly dead market doesn't always stay that way if you innovate.

I think that opera has become the third wheel when there is only enough space for 2. The opera browser is pretty good IMHO and it has some outstanding features that people may enjoy but it just doesn't have firefox's plugin support or the wide acceptability and market share of IE. If everybody used opera, everybody would probably continue using opera just how if everybody used firefox, they would continue using firefox, and how now that ~80% use IE, about 80% continue to use IE. Browsers and pretty much anything on the internet run into a phenomena known as network externalities. It is a situation where switching costs are so high that once a user is committed to one choice, they stick to it. Opera is just in the wrong market at the wrong time. This is also why firefox's progress is so amazing. Fighting network externalities is very tough (see ipv4 vs. ipv6).

Opera cache's the hell out of everything. I remember navigating to http://localhost:3000 when developing a rails app without actually starting up a rails server, and seeing the last version of my rails app show up.

That and some wonky CSS rules are my only complaint.

Its about money:

Firefox has Google

IE has Microsoft

Safari has Apple

Opera only has Opera backing it.

The browser might be ready but the add-ins are not. I just installed Unbuntu 8.04 Hardy and the FF v3 beta 4 worked great, however 70% of my add-ins didn't work. Including things like Filter-set G (must for add blocking), Tab Mix Plus and FoxMark book mark Synchroniser, CustomizeGoogle. Things I can't live without. SO I went back to FF2. By the way you can have both installed and only minor problems using them with same settings. Don't launch at same time though

Install Mr. Tech Toolkit https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/421

Under "tools" in the extensions manager, there will be an option "make all compatible". It'll disable the compatibility checks. Works great for me so far.

Thanks I will try that

It didn't work. Not compatible with version beta 4

Hmm, I must've installed it before the upgrade.

See if you can install it on firefox 2, disable compatibility checks, then open firefox 3.

Actually, try this instead:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/6543

Alternatively, you can add a boolean "extensions.checkCompatibility" field in about:config and set it to false.

Much more elegant solution, modded up! :)

I did that but it somewhat defeats the purpose of the whole thing. The problem is that some of the add-ins do NOT work with the beta version so overwriting the check is kind of an exercise in futility

Prime time = no Firebug? Eep. I'll wait until it comes out on DVD. It worked fine for me, but I kind of use Firebug a lot. Sorry, I forgot I was on the internet. I use it alot.

Installing version 3 dumped all my sessions. Not a big deal, but FYI that you'll have to re-log in to everything if you have the same experience I did.

The Firebug 1.1 Beta works with FF3 http://www.getfirebug.com/

Great, but I think I will wait for version 3.01 when they fix most of the bugs. I am still running v. 1.5, as FF 2.0 was terrible, ok maybe not terrible, I just didn't like a lot of the changes they did to the ui.

First impressions: I like it. It starts up much more quickly (I'm on OS X), and the interface is nicer (the tabs look better, the back button is larger than the forward button).

Does that mean that FF3 is now in Google-beta (as opposed to normal beta, where prime-time comes _after_ the beta versions)?

I won't get on the bandwagon yet until I can use Vimperator and FireBug without any problems.

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