It's Firefox 3 Download Day

My take: I've been running Firefox 3 in beta for a couple of months now. The only reason I'm doing it is that Ubuntu 8.04 LTS — one of the versions of the free, open-source GNU/Linux operating system I'm running right now — decided to use FF3 instead of the more established FF2. The reason Ubuntu did this was that the LTS release gets support for three years, and they wanted to front-load it with as many new packages as possible, FF3 being among them.

From the early betas to the release candidates, FF3 has gotten better. I haven't seen any performance improvements. On one of my boxes, I thought FF3 ran a little worse, but that was a few builds ago.

On my main laptop, which is running Ubuntu 8.04, FF3 is running nicely. Again, I notice no speed improvement over FF2.

One thing that has been chapping my ass quite regularly, however, is that while Google Gears — the browser extension that allows you to use Google Docs while not connected to the Web — works for Linux, it doesn't yet work on FF3. And I really, really want Google Gears on my Ubuntu installation. That's the only computer I have that is not constantly networked, and I'd be able to use Google Docs a lot more if Gears worked with FF3.

Now that FF3 is at the final-release stage, perhaps the Google Gears team will finally port their excellent application to it.

Otherwise, I'm glad that Firefox is moving forward, especially in terms of making their application less of a memory hog — that's something we can all use.

On my Windows PC, which is running FF2, I won't replace it with FF3 for quite some time. For one thing, I'm all about waiting until many of the bugs are worked out of these early releases, and for the other, I use a few critical Firefox extensions that might not be ready to work with FF3, or won't work as well with it until things settle down a bit.

There are still people — and still Linux distributions with a lot of life in them, if that matters to you and yours — using Firefox 1.5 and patching it themselves whenever a problem is found in FF2. Ubuntu 6.06 LTS, Red Hat/CentOS 3, 4 and everything up to 5.1 ... and others I can't think of, or don't know about. Red Hat/CentOS 5.2, however, is moving to FF3.

So even FF1.5 is still being used. That means that FF2 has quite a bit of life in it. And when Mozilla decides to snuff it out, even that doesn't mean it's the end for FF2.

Keep an eye on FF3. You might want to try it today ... or a month or two from now.