There is a lot of talking going around the Internet about Firefox 3 Beta being ready for mass usage. It’s because of an article by Reuters where the creators of Firefox supposedly told them that the Firefox 3 Beta is ready for everyone to use after months of being in development.
The problem is that Reuters is really making it sound like everyone should go out and download Firefox 3 Beta as if it was officially released. I’ve been using nightly builds of Firefox 3 for months, and I can say that it has come a long ways. However, I wouldn’t go putting it on my mom’s computer because there are still some things that need to be polished before the browser is pushed out the door.
What I noticed is that Reuters doesn’t explicitly quote someone from Mozilla as saying that it is ready for prime-time, but they do have Mozilla’s Vice President saying that it is “much more stable than anything else out there.” Sure it might be stable, but what about the dozens or even hundreds of extensions that aren’t going to work like they do in Firefox 2? The developers and power users who are already using the Beta know what they could be getting themselves into.
I have a feeling that Reuters took some things out of context and drew up their own conclusion as to whether Firefox 3 Beta is ready for the masses, and I wouldn’t be surprised to see an announcement by Mozilla saying that this isn’t meant for everyone quite yet. I mean really, if everyone should be using it then why hasn’t it been officially released?
If you do want to give the latest Firefox 3 Beta a whirl I highly recommend snagging it from PortableApps. That way you can see what it has to offer and determine whether it is ready for you without having to install a thing, and your previous Firefox profiles will remain untouched.
That’s crazy, news agencies should not be writing articles like this. What ever happened to writers verifying their facts before printing an article? Bad press. And I see there is no way to leave comments. I can see this is likely to create some problems for people in the short term.
Wrong link in the first paragraph. The Reuters link takes me to [cybernetnews.com]
Have you tried to backup and restore bookmarks? I can’t seem to get my tagged bookmarks to successfully transfer from one profile to another.
There’s a number of serious usability problems still.
Yes, the article was total BS. Maybe written by an intern or newbie.
Many software websites themselves – I mean popular sites, not geek oriented – propose FF 3 Beta as if it was obvious, without even mentioning the required precautions related to beta stage.
As Ryan states it, “I mean really, if everyone should be using it then why hasn’t it been officially released?”. Indeed. This is beta and should be announced clearly as such.
Nevertheless, I am anxiously waiting for the first final release. I appreciate to notice that meanwhile many programmers are updating their FF extensions. Hopefully many will be ready for the big entrance!
Oops…fixed!
I haven’t tried to backup and restore my bookmarks yet, but I have run into troubles where it wouldn’t let me create folders nor would it remember the position if I rearranged the bookmarks. It’s kind of an intermittent thing, but it’s been working good for the last few days.
Exactly. If they would have just taken out the section of the article where they say it is ready for prime time then I think they would have covered themselves. Because later in the article they do say that the Firefox 3 page states that it’s a developer-only release, but they say that they expect that to be removed soon.
No it isn’t!!! Everytime I view this site in Firefox 3, Firefox crashes.
Huh, what version are you using. I’ve got Firefox 3 Beta 4 running on several computers and it has no troubles with our site.
Is there any way i can run Firefox 3 beta4 on linux without touching my old profile. This is very simple in windows using the portable version as you mentioned but i havent come across any simple method to do this on linux.
It could possibly be an extension, Ryan. I’ll check it out later when I have free time.
There’s nothing super easy that I can think of, but you can use the profile manager to create a separate profile:
[kb.mozillazine.org]
I thought that Mozilla had done this to keep Firefox in the limelight after the 3.1 release of Safari went official on Windows. And I suspect they knew that WebKit and Opera were going to announce that they’d achieved 100% on Acid 3.
The extensions issue is a big deal and most people will expect their extensions to work as soon as they upgrade to FF3.
I’m sure everyone would feel a lot better if they just acknowledged that FF3 is a year late like most other browser projects.