Firefox 3.0

I’ve been using Firefox since version 0.5.  I was glad to see it reach the version 1.0 milestone and have been over the moon with version 2.0.  I have to admit that I have never even looked at or tried any of the version 3.0 release candidates.  Nevertheless Firefox version 3.0 is here and I’ve downloaded and installed on my three primary machines (two Windows XP desktops and a Mac OS X Panther/10.5 laptop).

I use quite a few add-ons, but haven’t found any thing that’s incompatible with 3.0 that I can’t live without.  There were no updates for del.icio.us 1.2.1 buttons and domainFinder 0.3, but I use Delicious Bookmarks instead of del.icio.us buttons so no big loss overall.  Zotero, Screen grab!, meebo, Gmail Space, Foxmarks Bookmarks Synchronizer, Forecastbar Enhanced, EditCSS all had updates readily available or passed compatibility checks with Firefox 3.0.

The biggest issue so far I’ve had is with the Adobe Flash Player.  Once Firefox was installed, there was an update to the Adobe Flash Player pushed out the next day.  After installing the Flash Player plug-in update and restarting the browser, I kept receiving a message that I needed to install Flash Player for any sites requiring Flash and reinstalling it wasn’t very productive.  So I found the following which was quite helpful:

For Windows do this:

1. Download this uninstaller from Adobe.com
2. Download this installer from Adobe.com
3. Close Firefox
4. Run the uninstaller, then the installer
5. Open Firefox

I’d normally reference the URL, but I’ve upgraded Firefox on my Mac laptop and strangely the URL doesn’t appear in the address bar (actually a copy & paste from a Google search works – http://support.mozilla.com/tiki-view_forum_thread.php?locale=en-US&comments_parentId=70775&forumId=1). So, I’m looking forward to checking out the new features with Firefox 3.0, but so far I’m still working out the kinks.