Everyone likes something shiny and new so it didn’t come as much surprise to see eight million people download Firefox 3 – spurred on by a brilliant campaign by Mozilla to break a world record for downloads in a single day.
While Firefox is becoming more popular, the reality is people who enthusiastically downloaded as soon as it was released into the wild may have been suckered. Among the issues is a security problem discovered by Tipping Point DVLabs that Mozilla will have to plug soon with a 3.0.1 release.
As well, many people who downloaded Firefox 3 were surprised to discover that some of their extensions/add-ons – the mini-features you can download to customize and personalize Firefox – don’t work yet.
And then there’s the location bar that has drawn heavy criticism because it auto-populates Web sites as you type in URLs. It is strange that Firefox 3 offers no way for people to turn off the auto-populate tool even though it’s a major change from Firefox 2.
Maybe Firefox 3 was rushed out the door. Perhaps, for example, Mozilla should have offered an extension test service so people could get a sense of what works and what didn’t. Based on the results, you could decide whether to upgrade now or wait.
Personally, the download for Firefox 3 is sitting on my desktop collecting dust. It’s there but, for now, I’m not going to climb on the Firefox 3 bandwagon until version 3.0.1 and some assurance that some of my key extensions/add-ons play nice with Firefox 3.
One more thought: As much as people are excited about a new and, well, improved Firefox 3, it would be great see to Mozilla give some more love to its email client, Thunderbird. In a world dominated by Outlook, GMail, Yahoo Mail and Live.com/Hotmail, Thunderbird also seems like an after-thought.
This website uses IntenseDebate comments, but they are not currently loaded because either your browser doesn't support JavaScript, or they didn't load fast enough.
Did We Get Suckered by Firefox 3?
Everyone likes something shiny and new so it didn’t come as much surprise to see eight million people download Firefox 3 – spurred on by a brilliant campaign by Mozilla to break a world record for downloads in a single day.
While Firefox is becoming more popular, the reality is people who enthusiastically downloaded as soon as it was released into the wild may have been suckered. Among the issues is a security problem discovered by Tipping Point DVLabs that Mozilla will have to plug soon with a 3.0.1 release.
As well, many people who downloaded Firefox 3 were surprised to discover that some of their extensions/add-ons – the mini-features you can download to customize and personalize Firefox – don’t work yet.
And then there’s the location bar that has drawn heavy criticism because it auto-populates Web sites as you type in URLs. It is strange that Firefox 3 offers no way for people to turn off the auto-populate tool even though it’s a major change from Firefox 2.
Maybe Firefox 3 was rushed out the door. Perhaps, for example, Mozilla should have offered an extension test service so people could get a sense of what works and what didn’t. Based on the results, you could decide whether to upgrade now or wait.
Personally, the download for Firefox 3 is sitting on my desktop collecting dust. It’s there but, for now, I’m not going to climb on the Firefox 3 bandwagon until version 3.0.1 and some assurance that some of my key extensions/add-ons play nice with Firefox 3.
One more thought: As much as people are excited about a new and, well, improved Firefox 3, it would be great see to Mozilla give some more love to its email client, Thunderbird. In a world dominated by Outlook, GMail, Yahoo Mail and Live.com/Hotmail, Thunderbird also seems like an after-thought.
Technorati Tags: Firefox, Thunderbird