Firefox 3 won’t be out of beta until the end of June but Mozilla told Reuters yesterday that anyone can go ahead and download the most recent version and run it without worrying too much. It’s now stable enough for everyone, not just developers.
From Reuters,
Until now Mozilla has discouraged the typical computer user from exploring these new features. But its developers said on Thursday that the situation has changed and that they will be revising their Web site.
As of Thursday afternoon, the Web site still stated: “We do not recommend that anyone other than developers and testers download the Firefox 3 beta 4 milestone release. It is intended for testing purposes only.”
But they said that as they concluded their fourth round of tweaking their software, they determined it was ready for prime time.
Sure enough, if you visit the Firefox 3 Beta 4 download page, there’s no such warning message any more.
I’m using Beta3 and it’s great. Memory hogging is definitely down
If they’re recommending that everyone download it, doesn’t that make it a release, or at least a RC?
Does anyone know how to check if extensions are FF3 compatible without downloading and installing FF3?
Their compatibilites should be listed at extensionroom.mozdev.org or wherever you got them, but that’s pretty tedious. You could install FF3 alongside FF2 and let it detect and install for you, but that might introduce unpleasantness to your system.
Those were both solutions I thought of and discarded for the same reasons you listed :-D Perhaps I’ll try it on Ubuntu before migrating to Windows, see if there’s any “unpleasantness”.
I don’t see how this would be relevant to anyone that reads this blog: none of us heed warnings.