How did Firefox 3 do?
Posted by James | Filed under Geek, Web
This morning it looked like Mozilla was on track to set a world record by serving up 5 to 7 million downloads of Firefox 3 within 24 hours of the web browser’s release. But by day’s end, (well, 24 hour’s end anyway), you all smashed that number and downloaded Firefox 3 over 8 million times.
Mozilla is still waiting to get confirmation from the folks at the Guinness Book of World Records before proclaiming the official number, but Mozilla Links pegs the number at 8,290,908, give or take a few. And NetApplications says that Firefox 3 went from less than 1% of the browser market this morning to almost 3% in a matter of 13 hours.
No matter what, Mozilla will have set a world record though — since they’re competing in a brand new category.
Tags: firefox, Firefox 3, Guinness World Records, mozilla, Mozilla Firefox
Firefox 3 Release Candidate 2 Released
Posted by James | Filed under Web
Firefox 3 Release Candidate 2 is now available for download, but read the release notes first so you can familiarize yourself with the known issues.
Some advice from that issues page:
- Don’t install Firefox 3 and Firefox 2 in the same directory.
- The Crash Reporter may not activate if Flash causes a crash.
- Delete an entry from history, then clear private data, and they know Firefox crashes already.
- You may need to reset some customized toolbars.
- Some Web pages don’t properly detect Silverlight.
- There’s not yet a Windows Media Player for Windows Vista users.
- DNS lookups may be slow on the Mac for IPv6 users.
- Linux users may have to reconfigure their mice.
Remember that this is beta code. That’s cool because use of beta code is one of your privileges — some might say obligations — as an open source user. The more beta-testers code has the more bugs are found and the better the final release.
Beta testing is not only troublesome fun but it gives you insights into the development process, which can lead you deeper into the open source world.
And don’t forget to read the bug filing instructions before reporting to Bugzilla.
Now get out there and find what’s wrong!
The final ship date for the software is still scheduled for later this month.
Tags: beta, browser, firefox, mozilla, Open Source, software
Opera Releases Firebug Competitor - Dragonfly
Posted by James | Filed under Code, Geek, Mobile, Web
For web developers, the Firefox extension Firebug is a killer app and major time saver. It lets you deconstruct the page currently loaded into Firefox to get a better idea of how HTML, CSS, and JavaScript needs to be modified to work properly (even allowing live changes to CSS/HTML on the fly).
Opera has just released an alternative set of developer tools called Dragonfly. They will be automatically included in Opera 9.5 beta 2 and newer versions of the browser, and you will be able to enable them by going to "Tools > Advanced > Developer Tools".
The Norwegian software producer is highlighting several innovative features of Dragonfly that could give it an advantage over Firebug, all depending on how well they work.
Dragonfly will make it possible to debug web pages whether they’re on your desktop computer or any remote device, like a mobile phone, that runs the Opera browser. This has the potential to make development for mobile devices much easier.
To JavaScript developers’ delight, Dragonfly will display the most up-to-date document object model (DOM) of a page, not just its initial construction. This means the effects of dynamic changes to a page, whether Ajax-driven or not, will now be much more transparent and traceable.
Dragonfly is also said to have a sophisticated JavaScript debugger that lets you diagnose errors on a line-by-line basis. JavaScript notoriously lacks any real debugging capabilities so this feature holds a lot of promise for developers tired of inserting alert functions throughout their code to see where it breaks.
A couple downsides: it will only be available for Opera, certainly not one of the most widespread browsers, and it won’t initially support in-browser edits to CSS styles. This latter shortcoming is a big one since CSS editing constitutes perhaps the most useful feature of Firebug.
Dragonfly will be released as open source under the BSD license. Microsoft announced at MIX that it has also worked on a set of developer tools for Internet Explorer 8, still in early beta.
Tags: debugging, development, javascript, mozilla, opera, tools
Welcome to Jimmahdigital.com, personal blog of James Simm, Wigan/Manchester-based .Net developer.
