Firefox 3: Finally Available, But Slow to Download

by Sam Dean - Jun. 17, 2008Comments (1)

As Mike noted earlier, Mozilla dropped the ball on its goal of delivering the new Firefox 3 browser at its planned time this morning. However, after hours of waiting, I have just downloaded it (the download took several minutes), and you can too.  Mozilla will take some heat for the downtime today, when the goal was to set a world record for software downloads, but Firefox 3 remains good news. Unlike the pre-release versions, this new version does support many of my extensions--though not all. We're predicting that this version will send Firefox's market share above 20 percent. Speed and memory handling will get people to upgrade or switch. Here's more.

Researchers at Net Applications have forecasted that Firefox will crack 20 percent market share in July, following the release of version 3, and we agree with them.
Net Applications' data shows that Firefox's market share rose in May to 18.4 percent, while Internet Explorer's dropped by a percentage point.

Mozilla did everything it could to trumpet the release of version 3. The company  pronounced, today, Tuesday, Download Day with the goal of earning Firefox 3 a Guinness World Record for most software downloaded in a 24-hour period. OStatic  backed  this effort with a Firefox 3 Download Day banner on our home page. It's unfortunate that the download sites were down for hours starting at the pre-announced 10 a.m. Pacific kickoff time.

Nevertheless, you can get the browser now. Our review of Firefox 3 RC 1 will get you up to speed on most of what to expect in the new version. The main difference between the oficial release and RC1 is that Firefox 3 now supports extensions, which none of the pre-release versions natively did (note that not all extensions have been updated for the new version). There is also a very extensive, screenshot-based Field Guide to Firefox 3, with categorized snapshots of what's new.

As we've covered, the truly substantial rendering performance improvements in version 3 of Firefox are the result of Mozilla moving the underlying rendering platform to Gecko 1.9, which has been in development for nearly three years. If you're a long-time Firefox user and you haven't yet used any of the beta versions for version 3, you'll be surprised by how much snappier it is, and that's the main reason why a whole lot of people will be upgrading.

There are also a lot of under-the-hood enhancements, including much better handling of memory (if you use a lot of tabs, get this new version for sure). Firefox 3 supports intelligent use of favicons, If you click on the favicon for any given site, you get a dialog box that will tell you whether the web site supplies identity information, whether you are connecting on an encrypted basis, and more.

Firefox 3 also has a new Add-on Manager, seen at left, which is available through the Tools/Add-Ons menu choices. You can download and install Firefox extensions and enhancements from this management console directly, instead of having to go to external web sites. This will encourage many more people to use Firefox extensions.

I agree with Mike that Mozilla could have executed on its Download Day plan a little better. Still, I'm happy to have the new version of Firefox loaded, and stay tuned for more from us on it. Here are some notable items from Mozilla about the release:

 

  •     * Speed: improvements to our JavaScript engine as well as profile guided optimizations have resulted in continued improvements in performance. Compared to Firefox 2, web applications like Google Mail and Zoho Office run twice as fast in Firefox 3, and the popular SunSpider test from Apple shows improvements over previous releases.
  •     * Memory usage: Several new technologies work together to reduce the amount of memory used by Firefox 3 over a web browsing session. Memory cycles are broken and collected by an automated cycle collector, a new memory allocator reduces fragmentation, hundreds of leaks have been fixed, and caching strategies have been tuned.
  •     * Reliability: A user's bookmarks, history, cookies, and preferences are now stored in a transactionally secure database format which will prevent data loss even if their system crashes.


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1 Comments
 

Still, very impressive for what started out as the Netscape browser, to claw its way back to almost 20% market share! It was rumored that when IE started taking on Netscape Navigator, their magic market-share number was 25%, at which point, a majority of all developers would not be able to ignore the dual-browser-development strategy, and following that tipping point, Microsoft would be able to beat out Netscape by basically circling the wagons with better tools and a more 'integrated' experience. What will the the Open Source community use to circle the MSFT wagons this time around?

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