[PCWorld]

Post your comments for Firefox 3.5 RC2: A Quick First Look here

[ragingdrunk]

Heh. I tried the geolocation thing and it told me I am in downtown NYC. I live in South Carolina.

[GraysonPeddie]

Mozilla's Geolocation test page indicates that I am located west of Apalachicola, FL near the Gulf Coast, but I am located in Altha, FL.

[DTNick]

These sort of geolocation features can be hit-or-miss to say the least. A writer on the site I used to write for had a similar experience when his iPod Touch identified his location as being a mere 1,000 miles from his actual location:
http://www.dtgeeks.c...s/article/quicktipimprovelocatemes_accuracy/

[jdev0203]

As far as private browsing, RC2 does give you an indication that you're in private browsing mode. IN the title bar of each page, right after the title is "(private browsing)".
Haven't yet tried the geolocation feature.

[abhinavk]

Firefox 3.5 RC2's GeoLocation feature tells me that I'm in Jaipur, India and it is right. I hope it will work in US.

[innercr]

I've been using FF 3.5 beta for some time now and have to say that it is still very unstable. I run FF on both, Windows 7 and Ubuntu 9.04 and regardless which OS I use, FF crashes frequently and most add-ons are not compatible with it yet. I have yet to notice speed improvement, at least FF is not as nimble as Opera. My verdict is: FF 3.5 Beta is not quite ready for production and I'll continue using the tried and true 3.1 version - sorry FF, more work needs to be done...

[GuestJim]

Does anyone at PCWorld check the validity of some of the claims you make in these articles? This is not the first time I have seen an article claim that older versions of Firefox don't allow you to drag tabs from one window to another (I think it was also mentioned when comparing it to Chrome when that was first released), and I just did that in Firefox 3.0.11 on my other computer. That is not a new feature (maybe to the Firefox 3 series over the Firefox 2 series, but not 3 to 3.5).

[johnwalterman]

Hmm it seems Firefox is just getting the features coined by other browsers already, such as IE's InPrivate Browsing and Chrome's Moveable Tabs.

Imagine if Microsoft added tear-off tabs! Windows haters would go crazy saying they copied it from Google Chrome and Safari, yet when Mozilla blaitantly copies features of browsers people couldn't care less. Looks like an anti-MS bias to me.

I'll keep my Internet Explorer 8, thank you very much.

And I'll always have Safari as my backup browser if I ever run into issues. Maybe if Mozilla did something fantastic and fresh I would consider trying firefox.

[innercr]

For the record, Microsft has finally created a browser that is secure. Don't belive me? Google has a lot of reports about numerous security issues with all preceding versions of IE up to version 8.

Why limit yourself in choices? Try Opera rather than FF. It is by far much faster and safer build than IE8, and has more funcitonality. Opera is a lot more bleeding edge technology as opposed to Firefox, where as Firefox has much more going on in respect to various add-ons. Google Chrome is fast but in fact still too limited and Safari as you mentioned it, is a product that has had numerous security loopholes that Apple didn't care to speedily close until this month.

Anyhow, FF, Google Chrome and Opera enjoy a lot better development because they are open source applications, meaning anyone with developing skills can contribute to the project. This creates unprecendent opportunity for many more developers around the world to partake. This cumulative effort makes the product better, not worse.

IE and Safari are the product of closed source on the other hand and in this scenario there're so to speak, far fewer developers working at the project. No one exchanges opinions or ideas as the corps dictate to get the project done notwithstanding what consumers may say.

[DTNick]

@GuestJim: While you can drag tabs from window to window in Firefox 3.0, you can't, say, drag a tab from a window onto the desktop to spawn a new window. This is a new feature in 3.5.

[abhinavk]

In Firefox 3, you can drag a tab from a window to another, but then it will reload in the new window. So you cannot call it tear-and-drag. And dragging a tab to desktop is a new feature.

[abhinavk]

If implemenatation of that feature by Mozilla is copying, then all other browsers have copied almost everything from them. The first browser (graphical) was Mosaic, which was acquired by Netscape and as Netscape and Firefox share the same codebase of Mozilla, so if any other browser eg Chrome, safari is able to render Graphical web pages then it is copying a Mozilla-feature.

[GuestJim]

I just tried dragging a tab to the desktop in Firefox 3 and it made a shortcut instead of opening a window, so that is new, yes.
I am curious about what the definition of tear-and-drag is because when I drag a tab from one window to another in FF 3 it also brings that tabs history with it, so one can go to the previous of next page. So it is indeed as though the tab itself were just moved from one window to another. It also does not reload the tab it pulls the information from the cache as it succeeded doing so when I switched to Work Offline. Perhaps in FF 3.5 it is more efficient, but I cannot check as my computer running that is at home.
I perhaps I should add that in FF 3 if you drag a tab from one window to another then, in the first window, tell to undo close tab it opens up the tab that was just moved, so perhaps FF 3.5 is more efficient/cleaner in how it does this.

[Meshuggah]

Perhaps you have frequent crashing because you are using Windows 7 Beta or RC. Which can cause problems especially when youre using other RC sofware within it. Also Ubuntu is pretty buggy anyway. I dont find it to be a very mature OS yet. Try XP or Vista.

[innercr]

Thanks for the advice, however I don't believe that one should adapt any given OS to the browser and not the other way around. I am trying to depart from aging Windows XP and steer away from Vista as much as possible. Soon enough XP will become so antiquated that a lot of new programs would have no legacy support for it.
Surely you cannot possibly say that Vista is any less buggy than the aforementioned Windows 7 RC and Ubuntu, can you? Microsoft has been struggling to patch up the bloated Vista for months if not years and only now you can get an SP2 which essentially does solve nothing but some security issues, and the end result is a crappy OS that no one desires to have on their machine. I own a computer repair business and most of my customers continue to run XP on their machines safely bypassing Vista. And that is what I recommend over Vista, as XP is certainly very mature and since its been written around single core processor it is pretty nimble on multi-core processors, far outstripping Vista and Win 7 in terms of performance.That's what computing should be like.

Anyway, without getting away on the tangent, I have to commend Opera on far more consistency when it comes to performance. Again, it runs without fail on both, Windows 7 RC and Ubuntu 9.04 so your argument really has no merit. The problem with Opera is that it does not support numerous add-ons and extensions but as far as stability it is not prone to crashes as much as FF.

Having said that, there's much work to be done on the part of Mozilla in order to fix all the issues abound in FF. Despite shortcomings, Firefox is still one of the best browsers around, that is both mature and reliable.

[GuestJim]

I haven't tried the RC or Beta on Ubuntu but haven't had any problems on my XP machine. Also, Ubuntu is not very buggy, at least not normal use.

[innercr]

Actually, at least for me, Ubuntu is pretty buggy when it comes to displaying/playing Flash content. On many occasions while playing a simple newscast in FF, the system would freeze completely and only hard reboot would get it to work. XP by the same token is very stable in all respects, as well as using FF in XP is a pleasure - no hickups of any kind..I tried both, RC and Beta in XP and did not get any problems..

[firestarultra]

yup it sure does. was just about to post that.

[NoBullroarAllowed]

I instituted the preview version a few weeks ago and found it to be exactly as advertised.