Test drive Firefox 3 RC1, and Flash 10
Posted by Peng on 17 May 2008
Mozilla has released Firefox 3 Release Candidate 1, and it’s almost ready to be released. But now they’d like more of you to check it out and see if you find any bugs that absolutely, positively have to be fixed before Firefox 3 gets its official release.
Of course this is still a testing release and not all extensions and themes have been updated to take work with Firefox 3 yet. And as a testing release it’s strongly recommended that you back up your profile before you start Firefox 3. As I said when Ubuntu Hardy got Firefox 3 Beta 5 as the default browser last month, Firefox 3 makes enough changes to your profile to possibly render your profile useless in Firefox 2 so you should set up a new profile for Firefox 3 to use, just in case you dislike all of the (rather drastic) Firefox 3 developers made.
As Mike Beltzner writes on the Mozilla Developer’s blog, you should definitely “read the release notes and known issues before installing this release.” Asa Dotzler also has some of the benefits awaiting users in Firefox 3 on his blog. Of course you can read my posts here about some of the issues I have with Firefox 3, and Nanci also wrote a review of Firefox 3 from a user’s point of view, unlike my posts which are more from a tech and beta tester’s point of view.
If after reading all release notes and known issues you still want to give Firefox 3 RC1 a whirl you can grab it from the announcement on the MozDev Blog.
Flash 10 goes Beta as well
Adobe has released a beta of Flash 10, although there are still some issues to be resolved, at least for Linux users. They’ve also published a page of demos of some of the new features in Flash 10, and I have to admit they’re pretty cool. Unfortunately the known bugs in full-screen video and the lack of 64-bit support still need to be resolved and I’m still seeing menus being hidden behind Flash content, but I am seeing improvements in speed for existing Flash content, including the videos on YouTube, Cute Overload and full episodes on NBC.com.
Tom Dryer over at Planet Ubuntu Users has published a page with information on the new beta, including instructions for installing it in Ubuntu Hardy.
