“These Release Notes cover what’s new, download and installation instructions, known issues and frequently asked questions for the Firefox 2.0 RC3 release. Please read these notes and the bug filing instructions before reporting any bugs to Bugzilla.”
If you’re already running RC2 and it’s not trying to automatically update yet, go to Help->Check For Updates… (under Windows and Linux at least).
I’ve been running this since RC1 and it’s really stable for me. A bit faster maybe too. The new theme is fantastic as well. The recently closed tabs menu is quite nice too, it’s under the History menu (labeled ‘Go’ under pre 2.0 builds).
Over all very nicely done. Kudos to the FF team and contributors everywhere.
errr…. yes it is
at least my Firefox 2.0 RC2 updated automatically to Firefox 2.0 RC3, and i didn’t have to do what you’re saying.
I only said that if it wasn’t automatically updating (it wasn’t this morning for me, about 6 hours ago). I didn’t say everyone was having that problem.
I’m happy to see firefox is progressing in version number!
but honestly… with my FF 1.5 and current extensions/themes I’m 100% happy… I really dont want to move to Version 2.0 till the same extensions/themes are not available..!
I would imagine you won’t be waiting long. I use firebug frequently and that seems to work fine, it upgraded without a hitch.
Go ahead and upgrade then. Those extensions aren’t available now!
I made a blog post about this release this morning.
http://firsttube.com/read/First-Post-From-Firefox-2
RC 3 has been running perfectly so far. Stable. Attractive. Functional. Fast. This was a particularly good time to make the jump to v2 because most of the extensions I use have been updated. This includes AdblockPlus, Linkification, CustomizeGoogle, Inline Google Definitions, URL Fixer, Paste and Go, UI Tweaker and StumbleUpon!
My only complaint is about the way they redesigned how tabs are closed. Having a close button on each tab is inefficient with large numbers of tabs. For example, I may open 20 tabs of pictures and want to quickly close each after viewing. Selecting the leftmost tab and then clicking the [x] at the right in Firefox 1.5 was the easy and quick way to achieve this. Now, because tabs are not of equal sizes, it is much slower to individually click to close each tab.
This is why, I edited my config file to use the old tab close setup. If you also want to do this, go to about:config, search for browser.tabs.closeButtons and make the value 3. Now, Firefox 2 behaves like Firefox 1.5 in terms of closing tabs. A great improvement for me.
Edited 2006-10-17 20:15
CTRL+F4
The way you explain the new close buttons I agree with you. I very often have 20+ tabs open, and they are already small enough in version 1.5, I do not need a close button on each of them. Good that there is a work around.
or ctrl+w
or middle click
…but it seeams as of late everybody is able to bypass the pop-up blocker.
I haven’t read anything about what’s in 2.0, but I hope a beefed up pop-up blocker is part of it.
I know they fixed that, but I can’t remember if it was going in 2.0 or if it was going to be part of the 3.0 release. Basically, pages were using plugins like Flash to create a popup and that was bypassing the blocker.
There is a hidden setting for this:
http://hatem.phpmagazine.net/2005/08/tips_firefox_flash_popup_block…
I wonder if the developers will incorporate a similar feature to Opera whereby you can toggle the tab close button (i.e. the X).
I find it very useful as I always switch it off! I guess it’s a useful feature to have for Firefox (and Opera) virgins though. 🙂