CSSquirrel

I doubt anyone needs me to tell them this, but Firefox 3 is launched. Go get it. Well, get it if you can manage to load Mozilla’s page. Talk about a heavy server load.

When it comes to browsers, Firefox is my primary choice. It’s combination of strong standards support and large addons library makes it not only desirable, but indispensable in how I browse and work on the Net. I know I can do web development without Firebug, but I certainly don’t know why I’d want to.

Although I’ve been running the beta (then later the release candidates) for some time now, I’m excited for the upcoming official release of Firefox 3 tomorrow. Although I hadn’t planned out a release party like Mozilla has encouraged as part of their Download Day 2008 event, I’ll definitely be upgrading to the release version to help with their “most downloads in one day” goal.

In related news, while I’ve made it clear how much I dislike their tendancy to swing at IE without checking if their own zipper is up, I am also glad to see Opera 9.5 has been officially released, bringing with it a slick upgraded interface, more speed, and overall better standards support (but still no CSS3 rgba color support yet.) Between those two and Safari, a lot more CSS3 and other standards-related features are becoming available in 2008.

Now if only Microsoft would get off it’s lazy rear and announce a general target for when they plan to release IE8. Preferably this year…

When I first started thinking up the idea for this week’s comic, I thought it was an absurd intrusion of the adoration video games receive into an the stately field of browser software. After all, despite the fact that web browsers are probably some of the most ubiquitous bits of software floating around on people’s computers, your average Joe doesn’t go bananas for a new release, do they?

Apparently, as I learned from this little tidbit at the Web Standards Project, the idea isn’t as far fetched as I thought. It turns out that Mozilla is looking to get Firefox 3 to be the most downloaded piece of software in a single day, with an event they call Download Day 2008, and among other things they’re building excitement for it by encouraging people to have launch parties.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m super excited for Firefox 3. I’ve been using the beta (now the release candidate) for weeks now, and I can’t help but feel that it’s an upgrade in every way, shape, and form. It’s faster, it’s sleeker, has sweet add-ons, and among many other things it now supports inline-block (the most neglected of CSS display types). Of course, it doesn’t have multiple-backgrounds yet, and is only supporting border-radius with a proprietary version… but I’m not expecting it to be perfect out of the gate (this doesn’t mean you have carte blanche to drag your feet on that, Mozilla.)

However, I never thought that browser software actually needed a launch party (well, outside of the company that slaved and toiled to make it.) But now that the topic has arisen, why not? As web professionals, we rely on constantly improving, standards compliant browsers to render our websites and run our web apps properly. Approaching 20% of the user browser share, Firefox is the forerunner in providing us with just that. It’s not only acceptable to encourage and celebrate it’s success, it makes great sense.

Of course, as near as I can tell from my short time in the field as a paid ‘professional’, developers don’t need a lot of excuses for a party.

Anyone going to be celebrating in Bellingham?

It’s been three days so far with the Firefox 3 beta on my home computer, and I’m loving it. I’ve manged to find FF3-capable versions of the add-ons I use the most, including Firebug, FireFTP, and del.icio.us, which was the major hurdle in my experimenting with earlier betas.

It is tremendously faster. I can’t get over how quickly it loads by comparison to version 2. Also, the interface is looking pretty slick. There’s bound to be a number of feature upgrades and functionality that I haven’t even noticed yet, but everything just feels like it’s working more smoothly.

Good work, Mozilla.

I’ve once again downloaded the Firefox 3 beta to my home system to check it out. The most obvious new thing that gets me excited is the faster speed and the smaller memory usage. My machine isn’t exactly new, smaller equals better.

What made me drop FF3 last time was the lack of add-on support thus far. But I’m running betas of both FireFTP and Firebug, which are practically impossible for me to function without these days.

I did just notice that the spell checker doesn’t seem to be doing its job. At least not in the blog editor. Hmmm. Oh, wait, now it kicked in. Very slowly.

I’ll see if I can tolerate this for a couple days, or if I’ll be regressing back to Firefox 2 until 3 goes out of beta.