Mike Arrington and Steve Gillmor don’t use Firefox 3.0
Tonight I was at a party where Mike Arrington, Steve Gillmor, and me were talking to Brendan Eich, CTO of Mozilla Foundation. You know, the fine folks who make the Firefox browser. During the conversation they admitted they don’t yet use Firefox 3.0.
Me? That’s ALL I use and I love it. I can’t wait for it to launch. Brendan said they don’t know the exact time yet that they will launch but gave strong indications it would be sometime next week.
Interesting that Walt Mossberg DOES use Firefox 3.0 and gave it a ringing endorsement, one that I can definitely add onto. There’s no better browser out there. None. On my Mac I love it a lot more than Safari.

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June 6th, 2008 at 1:00 am
Fx v3 is definitely an improvement over FX v2, but many of the annoyances present in v2 is still there. So I will still keep using Opera as my primary browser. But almost always Firefox is also open while I am browsing, as I require some of the features offered by its extensions.
June 6th, 2008 at 1:07 am
We did some benchmarking between firefox 2.0 and firefox 3.0 on one of our applications which uses heavily Javascript, DHTML and timers and the results are very impressive: a much more fluid experience thanks to the timer/scheduling experience and an overall execution performance which is 3.5x faster. I am not exactly sure how they did it but the results are impressive.
June 6th, 2008 at 1:08 am
[...] - Mozilla FireFox 3 is great —even for Mac users (FireFox is better than Safari). [...]
June 6th, 2008 at 1:12 am
I absolutely love everything about Firefox 3.0… except, a couple of the extensions I use repeatedly in 2.0 aren’t compatible yet.
Ooooh how I hope they update them soon!
June 6th, 2008 at 1:53 am
I’ll move when my favorite addons are able to move with me.
June 6th, 2008 at 2:04 am
Waiting for my key add-on, Zotero, to become compatible (supposed to happen with the launch of Firefox 3).
June 6th, 2008 at 2:59 am
I don’t understand why we have upgrade instantly: the better way alsway is waiting some weeks and months of test and debugging. But for me now FF2 is enough.
June 6th, 2008 at 3:58 am
FF3 on the Mac is fine, but not on my 64-bit Vista computer; it would only run 1 time, wouldn’t uninstall, and I was unable to reinstall FF2. After registry editing, I was finally able to install and run FF2. Thinking it was a fluke, I tried 2 other times and had the same issues.
Until then, I’m staying with FF2, with working extensions, and Opera.
June 6th, 2008 at 4:41 am
I also am anxiously awaiting FF3 but you all bring up a good point. I now depend on the extensions I use to be upgraded too before I can upgrade. Looks like Better Gmail 2 0.5 supports it though!
June 6th, 2008 at 5:18 am
During the early alphas of FF3, it’s not good for daily use (hence, Alpha). But at some point of its alpha stages (can’t remember which), it is ready for daily use.
Since then I started using FF3 on every machine I use, from home, to notebook, to office. MS Win, GNU/Linux Ubuntu. FF3 solved many problems, and besides, I love testing products, especially bleeding-edge techs.
June 6th, 2008 at 7:54 am
What _about_ FF3 do you love particularly, vs. e.g. Safari?
June 6th, 2008 at 8:54 am
[...] out Robert Scoble on Firefox 3. I’d quote him, but I can’t find the appropriate part to quote. I get the impression [...]
June 6th, 2008 at 9:00 am
two really ugly things in FF3
- the address bar auto complete (HORRIBLE)
- the way the handle certificate issues (so many clicks and dialogs, really bad)
June 6th, 2008 at 9:42 am
Even with 5 million beta downloads, Opera 9.5 still wins me over FF3. But even still, I think 3 will be the breakout version, as even Average Joe computer users, know and love Firefox; it’s the one geeky app that has gotten mainstream crossover appeal.
But IE? What’s that? Only ever use via Maxthon, per extreme circumstances, if some evil (but necessary) site doesn’t work in Opera/FF.
June 6th, 2008 at 10:04 am
[...] besides…if Robert Scoble goes bananas about Firefox, you should too, [...]
June 6th, 2008 at 10:19 am
Mike Arrington and Steve Gillmor haven’t upgraded to FF3 full time for the same reason as most other hardcore users — a large portion of the popular extensions still haven’t been updated.
Most users don’t add extensions and FF will gain a great many new users when v3 goes gold, but at the moment, a lot of longtime power users like myself are feeling orphaned.
June 6th, 2008 at 10:24 am
I installed Firefox V3 RC2 and a DEV build of TabMixPlus and subsequently uninstalled Firefox V2.0.0.14.
Only issue I have is that I had to go into IE and set Security Zone settings to make downloads work in Firefox V3 that worked fine in Firefox V2.
June 6th, 2008 at 10:27 am
Here we go again! Firefox is clearly superior to anything else on the market.
June 6th, 2008 at 10:42 am
Opera here.
If the truth be known, Opera is a far superior browser in many ways.
They all are good browsers, but I keep coming back to Opera. It’s just a great browser for power users. Opera has a bit of a learning curve to take advantage of all its power and options, but take a week or so, and you’ll see for yourself what makes Opera stand alone. It’s faster than FF for me on the same platform, faster than IE, better security than either FF or IE.
More people need to give Opera a go. It’s a great piece of software that rarely disappoints me. I have never, ever had a crash in Opera like in FF or IE.
June 6th, 2008 at 11:20 am
I still use Safari on Leopard. Why? Much better integration with the system. Scrolling is much smoother, all form elements are native not faked to be so and therefore function properly, and for some reason FF3’s navigation bar is lighter colored than the bookmarks or title bar on my Mac making it look very odd.. seems I’m the only one with this issue but I can’t get it to go away.
Plus, as a web developer I seem to find the recent Safari builds to have the best renderer, which is important, and they’ve added tools such as Drosera and an Inspector which seal the deal.
June 6th, 2008 at 11:22 am
Too bad Opera isn’t open source and doesn’t have other projects using its code…
June 6th, 2008 at 12:14 pm
FF3 on Mac is just great! Anyway, I’ve been waiting desperately for an update of the great del.icio.us Bookmark plug-in. If someone at Yahoo is reading this: please keep up the good work on that plug-in.
Greetings from Berlin, Germany
Peter
June 6th, 2008 at 2:14 pm
I use both Firefox 3.0 and MSIE 7 and love both. Personally, the only thing I don’t like about Firefox 3.0 is that there are a few major extension (most notably, the Google Toolbar) have yet to reach the browser. All-in-all though, it’s a fantastic step forward for the browser.
June 6th, 2008 at 6:34 pm
FF3 made many changes, including a new javascript interpreter, which affect the operation of extension scripts. Stuff that used to happen synchronously now run in seperate independent processes. This speeds things up a lot on javascript-heavy pages (scripts no longer have to wait on each other), but it can disrupt things such as interaction between extension scripts and web page scripts.
It completely broke an extension I’ve been working on. My code would call a script on the web page and then keep executing, tring to fetch and use the result before the other script had finished processing and hadn’t yet returned a result. Fortunately, I was able to use new FF3 features to do things a different way, which resulted in faster, smaller code, and was much easier than the old way. Of course, then I had to write code to detect the availability of the new functions and do things either way, choosing appropriately, in order to be backwards-compatible with FF2 and earlier.
Extension developers are going to love coding for FF3, but it’s always a PITA when platform changes break things, and I expect the changes in FF3 broke a lot of extension scripts. The price of progress…
June 6th, 2008 at 8:11 pm
The Low-Tech Times HQ still uses Firefox 2.0.0.14.
June 6th, 2008 at 10:39 pm
I’d love to upgrade, but I’m gonna hold tight for at least a month and see how it all goes. Plus - I do a lot of testing in FF2.
June 7th, 2008 at 9:56 am
I run an online business website and use Firefox3.0 to acces joomla back-end. Combined with my MacBook Pro FF3.0 is absolutely brilliant!!
June 7th, 2008 at 12:06 pm
I use FF3 as my primary browser from about Beta 4. I think it is a best browser so far, although the game is far from over yet. Let’s see what IE8 would bring to the table.
June 7th, 2008 at 6:40 pm
Ffox 3 has a couple of problems. Video/audio freezes occasionally but predictably… though I think this has to more to do with another problem which is causing the browser to slow to a crawl. Maybe there are still some memory leak problems? It’s bad enough that I’ve considered rolling back.
June 8th, 2008 at 1:58 am
Feature-wise, I love FF3. But it’s slow as ass to launch. Safari fires up (sorry for the pun) right away.
June 8th, 2008 at 8:26 am
If they (Mike and Steve) aren’t using FF 3.0, what browser are they using? Safari? Camino? Opera? OmniWeb? Don’t leave us in suspense.
June 8th, 2008 at 3:25 pm
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June 9th, 2008 at 12:22 am
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June 12th, 2008 at 12:55 pm
Steve Gillmor went to a PARTY? Fuck me… was it some kind of affinity group meeting? My god that must have been hell!
June 12th, 2008 at 12:56 pm
Mike Arrington and Steve Gillmor don’t use rubber dildos either.. does that make news as well? FAIL try better scooby
June 20th, 2008 at 8:36 pm
[...] much to lose by switching to Firefox 3. I am loving it. It is the best browser out there. Scoble is using it too. A few of the goodies as described by [...]