Not that many new features are included in the release. The highly talked about Javascript engine TraceMonkey which promises performance boosts has to be activated separately in about:config by setting javascript.options.jit.content to true.

Other than that the Geode add-on has been included in the release which offers location based browsing although I would have preferred that Mozilla keeps the stance of not including add-ons with Firefox releases and leave it up to the user to decide whether he wants to use an add-on or not.

Firefox 2 reached about 1.6 million downloads in the first 24 hours and that’s probably the figure that needs to be reached as a minimum but only the sky is the limit as the FAQ on the page points out.

Dedicated users can pledge to download Firefox 3 during release day. It’s a pretty nice table sorted by countries. Currently more than 79K users have pledged to download Firefox during release day with the United States taking the lead followed by Spain, Poland and Germany.

If you want to pledge to the cause visit the Spread Firefox site and add yourself to the list. The release date will be published on that site as well.

via Sparx

The three Grand Prize winners are Tony Farndon from the United Kingdom for his Minimap Sidebar Extension, Massimiliano Mirra from Italy for his SamePlace add-on and Jay Meattle from the United States who created the Shareaholic add-on.

Minimap Sidebar Extension displays a minimap in the sidebar. Maps can be easily created by drag and drop or by right-clicking the information. It’s a real time saver if you have to lookup maps regularly.

SamePlace is a multi-network Instant Messenger add-on that makes it possible to chat with buddies from many IM networks in Firefox.

Shareaholic is a great add-on that lets a user add pages that he visits to popular social bookmarking and news websites like delicious and digg.

You do find 12 runner up add-ons on the website as well which are worth checking out as well.

The Firefox Live Chat Support is run by volunteers who know then ins and outs of Firefox and can help with almost any issue that you might be facing. What I really like is that the waiting time before you are connected to an agent is slim to none most of the time. Once the chat is loaded you can have a friendly chat with a support representative who is friendly and takes his time to chat with you.

I’m used to fast calls or chats when talking to representatives normally and this is a welcome difference. A test that I conducted revealed that they, or at least the agent that I was chatting with, knew a lot about Firefox. The agent did not just copy and paste knowledgebase articles but tried to explain everything in common words.

This is in my opinion an incredibly gain for the Firefox community and I would like to thank all volunteers for their work.

The final blog post at the official Netscape blog is answering some frequently asked questions about this decision and recommends to use Firefox with the Netscape theme and extensions instead.

I’m not sure why but I always thought of Firefox as a worthy successor of the Netscape browser. And it seems that the time is right to break the marketing domination with a free and better browser. It is a sad day nevertheless.

I thought I make a screenshot of each concept and put it up here so that everyone can take a look without having to visit the website. The website has only four links to the concept images and one called Brand Insights. If they want an advice, I think they should make a thumbnail of each image as well and post that.

After seeing all four images I think I would vote for number 2, the one called agile, with number 1 being a close second place. Which do you prefer ?

via Cybernet News

Firefox 3 will be an awesome browser. The developers managed to get rid of some of the memory problems that seem to plague Firefox 2 users and incorporates several beloved extensions into the main product. The release notes are a bit sparse on the changes in Beta 2 compared to Beta 1, here is what they say:

Firefox 3 Beta 2 includes approximately 900 improvements over the previous beta, including fixes for stability, performance, memory usage, platform enhancements and user interface improvements. Many of these improvements were based on community feedback from the previous beta.

My personal suggestion is to either install and use both browsers for a set period of time before you make the switch to Firefox 3 or wait until the first release candidate gets posted on the Mozilla website. I had good results using the portable version of Firefox 3 next to Firefox 2 which ensures that both browsers do not share the same profile.

You could create a new profile for Firefox 3 as well and make sure that this one is used whenever Firefox 3 is started while the default profile is used when starting Firefox 2.

Most extensions work flawlessly if you use the Nightly Tester Tools which fix extension compatibility in Firefox 3.

The Firefox development team reacted and created a webpage for users who wanted to reach the ftp site by clicking on a link at Digg.com. This article explained why it was not advised to download this version yet unless you wanted to take part in the beta testing process. Their reasoning was that the version was untested, did not make it through quality tests yet and that it was not mirrored properly.

What bothers me a little bit is that they do make this unfinished version available on a public ftp especially if they know that this can cause massive confusion on part of the user.

I’m thinking that putting those releases on a private part of the ftp with access for testers only would clean up this mess and prevent that similar things happen in the future.

The public ftp should only contain official releases that have passed the testing process and are properly mirrored. This can be beta versions and release candidates but not untested versions.