Just Thinkin' » Firefox/Thunderbird

Best Day at Just Thinkin’-June 17th, 2008

Kirk M — Fri, 20 Jun 2008 00:29:17 +0000

So what does it take to achieve the best day ever as far as unique visitors go? How about a single post about a certain popular Firefox extension and another on how to disable extension compatibility in Firefox? Yup that’s it; 1852 visitors with only a 50% bounce rate on Firefox Download-frickin’-Day–1783 visitors on the extension post and nearly all the rest on the "How to disable extension compatibility" post and the my usual, non-tech content bringing up the rear. I’m not even going to back-link to those two hard hitting posts since all my effort over the last few days was put forth in the ongoing process of setting up another site where those type of posts can live instead of here.

Okay, circumstances didn’t allow me to get everything up and running on the new site a couple weeks before the final release of Firefox 3.0 and I’m not really as disturbed as I sound but still…

*sigh*

I shouldn’t complain any. All those folks looking in and obviously finding the info they needed albeit it was for the beta builds of Firefox 3.0 and not the final (it still applied though). So here’s a big thanks to everyone who made up those 1852 visits and a bigger thanks to the 50% that actually stayed and looked around some. My daily visitors should shrink back to the usual 30 to 50 a day here real shortly.

Have fun with the Firefox 3.0 y’all!

Tags: JT News

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Firefox 3 Release Candidate 1 Code Complete!

Kirk M — Mon, 12 May 2008 14:00:09 +0000

The developers at Mozilla have handed off the final code for the upcoming Firefox RC1 to "Build" this morning:

Thanks to all the hard work of the Mozilla community as of 9:15 AM PDT today (Saturday, May 10th) we are code complete for Firefox 3 Release Candidate 1 (RC1). New nightly builds are available - if you are a nightly tester/Minefield user you can help test these builds by selecting “Check for Updates” from your help menu.

Mozilla Developer News » Blog Archive » Firefox 3 Release Candidate 1 Code Complete!

For those of you that are wondering how the stability of RC1 compares to the Beta 5 release of April 2nd; the difference is like night and day based on my use of the nightly builds. Beta 5 was buggy and crash prone, they knew it and announced it as well. The reason for releasing beta versions of new software to the public is to get their feedback and user feedback, especially in the case of open source software, is one of the primary driving forces behind the development of said software. And it’s become obvious that these users are taking this informal or "field" testing seriously considering that there are currently over 1.2 million Firefox 3 beta 5 users out there waiting to get their hands on RC1.

I do have to admit I probably missed the mark about my prediction that we’d see the RC1 released by the end of the week though:

Assuming no new issues are found today the build team will start official prep work for Release Candidate 1 (RC1) tomorrow. QA will start their extensive RC1 test pass on Monday. If all goes well we should have the Release Candidate publicly available in late May.

Mozilla Developer News » Blog Archive » Firefox 3 Release Candidate 1 Code Complete!

Well you can’t say that they’re hurrying this out the door now can you? The reason is simple–QA. And QA is everything without a doubt. How many times has a large, well established, proprietary OS/software manufacturer (any guesses who that might be?) pushed a "Final" product out the door before it was ready only to cause the user all sorts of grief and frustration? Be glad of the extra testing and know for a fact that Firefox 3.0 RC1 will not be released until it passes the QA gauntlet.

Don’t worry, it will be ready when it’s ready and that’s a good thing.

Technorati Tags: Firefox, Firefox 3, Firefox 3 RC1

Tags: Firefox, Firefox 3

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Firefox 3 RC1 Next Week?

Kirk M — Wed, 07 May 2008 20:15:04 +0000

For those of you who are anxiously awaiting the first release candidate of Firefox 3 (like me) it looks like the wait will soon be over. Checking the latest RC1 blockers (bugs that are currently blocking the release candidate) shows only 4 remaining bugs to squash before RC1 can get itself out of the trunk. And on the forum today, as some of you who followed my previous post may have already read, it was stated on the last nightly build topic that all blockers should be cleared up by tonight.

This means that RC1 can now come out of the oven and head to “build” and all the required QA testing from there. If all goes right I’m predicting we should see RC1 released sometime late next week (which is an educated guess on my part of course).

I’d still bet a nickle that I’m right though.

Of course this will mean I’ll have to find and install all my extensions again but what the heck, it isn’t the first time I’ve had to do that. In fact it’s not even the 18th time I’ve had to do that while testing the nightly builds. However, it should be the last time I have to do this right through the final release date..or at least that’s the grand scheme anyway.

Technorati Tags: Firefox 3, Firefox 3 RC1

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Keeping an Eye on Firefox 3 RC1

Kirk M — Sat, 26 Apr 2008 23:05:44 +0000

Checking in my stats the last few days I’ve noticed quite a few folks looking for information on the first release candidate of Firefox 3 and possibly when the release date might be. Well, the closest the developers will get on an actual date is “sometime in May” and since the date for the final release is “sometime in June” and that there’s at least an RC2 in there somewhere before the final, I’d expect RC1 somewhere within the first 10 days of May. Of course that’s just a guess on my part.

I’ve also noticed that most visitors who came to my site here looking for info on Firefox 3 RC1 didn’t stay too long either. Probably due to the fact that all I really said about RC1 was that when it comes out I was going to go off the trunk builds and go to the branch releases instead. Wasn’t exactly what they were looking for I would surmise.

So just so no one can say that I didn’t leave you with absolutely no real information on this subject yet a second time, here’s a link that you can use to keep an eye on the progress of RC1 as it works it’s way out onto the street.

Another source of info for those of you with a technical bend, try this section of the Mozillazine Forums and look for the latest The Official Win32 2008 ‘yada-yada’ [Trunk] build is not yet out entry. Browsing through the comments in these entries will give you a good idea how work is progressing on this latest version of Firefox.

So there you go. Once you check out the above links then you’ll know as much as I do.

Technorati : Firefox, Firefox 3

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Mozilla squashes Firefox 3 Flash Bug

Kirk M — Thu, 24 Apr 2008 20:20:32 +0000

This post is out of date: Please see the updated post on my new tech site–Green Mountain Geek

Adobe’s Flash plugin for Firefox has never offered the kind of quality performance that the equivalent plugin for Internet Explorer has but at least it handled most Flash based video fairly well. However, somewhere around the 14th of April the nightly builds of Firefox 3 began to seize up on websites that incorporated any sort of Flash based media at all be it video, images or advertisements. Sites that I had been able to view previously would lock up the browser completely and only a “Kill Process” via the Windows XP Task Manager would stop the CPU from having conniption fits about being maxed out at 99%.

This was annoying to say the least and more than troubling. What had been a consistently rock stable, memory friendly new version of Firefox was now no longer able to handle Flash based media? Off to the forums I go along with several other testers and early adopters as I found out when I got there.

Strangely enough I had had the presence of mind to test these sites using Opera 9.5 beta which I keep around for testing website rendering issues between browsers and all the sites that were killing the nightly builds were showing fine in Opera. Since Opera and Firefox use the same plugin this told me that something had changed in the nightly builds that was causing this problem. And since I’m not familiar with programming (yet, can’t teach an old dog new tricks? Watch me), it was up to convincing the Dev’s that this was indeed a serious problem.

I’ve got to hand it to the developers at Mozilla, the problem had been filed on 4/20/08 as a new bug, verified and confirmed and set as blocking Gecko 1.9 meaning Firefox 3. After only a couple days of digging around the code base of the latest nightly builds the developers at large found the problem and had it solved as of yesterday’s update for Minefield (name for any developer’s build of Firefox). Just a bit impressive if you ask me.

Certain types of Flash based media still comes up choppy and dropping frames as usual but that’s more due to the inherent problems of the Flash plugin for Firefox and Opera than anything browser related. I’m just glad that Firefox 3 is back to being a class act.

And kudos to the Dev’s at Mozilla. Nice work folks!

Technorati : Adobe Flash, Firefox, Firefox 3

Tags: Adobe Flash, Firefox, Firefox 3