Firefox 3 is officially released today (get your copy at http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/). To top it, Mozilla is going for a Guinness record on the most downloads of a single piece of software in one day. You can pledge to participate in this and then download a copy; you have until about mid-day on Jan. 18 (Pacific Time).
I’ve been holding off using this. Ever since I upgraded to Ubuntu 8.04 (THE FIGHTING HERON!), I’ve held back. This was largely for the same reason that other people have done this: extensions. These little plugins for firefox, which make it powerful, also mean you have to be patient if you want your favorites to work with a new version of the browser. My “can’t live without them” favorites are Zotero (http://www.zotero.org/), which I use to organize and find scientific papers, and Scribefire (http://www.scribefire.com/), which is how I usually edit this blog. I refuse to use a Firefox that doesn’t have these.
So I held off. Until today, that is. Zotero and Scribefire are fully compatible with Firefox 3, and so here I am!
I’ll have to run it for a while before I can form an opinion about FF3. Tech experts claim the memory usage of the application is vastly improved, in size and speed, making the browser less of a hog and consequently much faster. We’ll see. But so long as I have my extensions, I’ll use FF3.
