[UPDATED] Firefox 3 is ready to go, except on OSX

[Updated to include new info for Ubuntu users. - Peng]

Mozilla is almost ready to launch Firefox 3, but according to minutes from today’s status meeting there’s one bug affecting the Mac OSX builds that will force a third release candidate. It turns out users upgrading to OSX 10.5.3 are experiencing program hangs that can’t be killed.

Firefox 3 users running Windows or Linux will find that a third RC will be released, but it will be the same as Firefox 3 RC2. I’m not seeing a release date for RC3, but when I see one I’ll post it.

Ubuntu users are still waiting for Firefox 3 RC2, but hopefully it will be available in the hardy-updates repo soon. Updated 11 June 7:34 am: The hardy-update repo now has an update for Firefox 3 labeled version 3.0+nobinoly-0ubuntu0.8.04.1. It shows Firefox 3 as final, although Mozilla has not officially released Firefox 3 yet. Yes, Mozilla has said Firefox 3/Linux is finished, but this blogger can’t help but to think that once again Ubuntu has jumped the gun distributing Firefox 3. First they put out a late beta to all users despite Mozilla’s continued insistence that Firefox 3 beta 5 was not intended for everyone’s use, and now they pull a BetaNews-esque stunt and put out a final version before Mozilla does. WTF, guys? Can’t you at least follow Mozilla’s lead once?

Do more with Do

Looking at that title you’d think I was typo’ing the name of the mega caffeine drink from the Pepsi company, but you’d be wrong. What I am referring to is GNOME Do, a wonderful little time saver that I’ve written about before. If you thought GNOME Do was great before, you should check out the brand new version 0.5. Called  “The Fighting 0.5″, they’ve made several additions that make this already killer tool even more of a Must Have.

They’ve changed the preferences window and added a plugin manager that will let you browse, install and disable plugins right from the Do preferences window. There’s also wiki pages about each plugin, both the official plugins and the community created plugins, and you can configure plugins without having to dig through the Configuration Editor (gconf) any more. That alone is guaranteed to save you time in setting your computer up to work how you want it to work.

David Siegel tells us that they’ve fixed “tons of bugs” and there are even things that didn’t quite make it in time for this release so they’re looking at released in GNOME Do 0.5.1 “within a few weeks.” David includes a number of screenshots in his announcement plus he goes into a few more details than I wanted to duplicate here so go read his post.

For Ubuntu users who want to grab this update there is a Launchpad PPA you can use to get it even faster.

Thanks to everyone who worked on The Fighting 0.5, and big thanks to Jorge Castro for letting me know this update was available. Now if you’ll excuse me I want to go play with, er, check out all the new features.