It just updated itself & is driving me crazy. Links are now opening up in a new tabs & scrolling is screwing around with text size without selecting or doing anything

Whatever it was doing has miraculously & thankfully stopped

I'm guessing you stopped leaning on your Control key.

Firefox 3.0 RC1 is out. Has anybody tried the new version and have something to say about it? RC1 is better than beta, so it should be pretty close to a finished product?

How does the board look in the release candidates?

NEW YORK - A new version of the Firefox Web browser is scheduled for release Tuesday with improvements in security, speed and design.

Many of the enhancements in Firefox 3 involve bookmarks. The new version lets Web surfers add keywords, or tags, to sort bookmarks by topic. A new "Places" feature lets users quickly access sites they recently bookmarked or tagged and pages they visit frequently but haven't bookmarked.

There's also a new star button for easily adding sites to your bookmark list — similar to what's already available on Microsoft Corp.'s Internet Explorer 7 browser.

Other new features include the ability to resume downloads midway if the connection is interrupted and an updated password manager that doesn't disrupt the log-in process.

Firefox also will start blocking rather than simply warning about sites known to engage in "phishing" scams that try to trick users into revealing passwords and other sensitive information. The new version adds protection from sites known to distribute viruses and other malicious software.

The list of suspicious sites come from Google Inc. and StopBadware.org, a project headed by legal scholars at Harvard and Oxford universities.

Security researchers who need access to problem sites can manually turn the feature off.

Firefox 3 also offers speed and design improvements — the back button is now larger than the forward button, for instance, because people tend to return to a previous page more often, said Mike Schroepfer, the project's vice president of engineering.

Firefox is the No. 2 Web browser behind Microsoft Corp.'s Internet Explorer. It comes from Mozilla, an open-source community in which thousands of people, mostly volunteers, collectively develop free products.

Mozilla has been developing Firefox 3 for nearly three years and has been publicly testing it since November for Windows, Mac and Linux computers.

Its supporters are organizing launch parties around the world next week, and Mozilla is trying to set a world record for most software downloads in a 24-hour period.

Microsoft is currently testing Internet Explorer 8, while Opera Software ASA released Opera 9.5 on Thursday.

RC3 is now available.

Just wait until Tuesday to download the official release.

I never realized I had so many add-ons installed. I'll have to check their FF3 compatibility before I upgrade.

A surprising number of the addons continued to work for me
[/list]

Does FF3 check add-on compatibility before it installs or does it not tell you until after it's installed??

Does FF3 check add-on compatibility before it installs or does it not tell you until after it's installed??

I just installed it on two PCs and it checks after it installs, then offers to update them for you. Had to switch out Adblock for Adblock Plus on mine, no big deal.

MUCH faster loading pages now, very pleased with it so far.

Anyone know where the download manager options are? I looked in all sections of the options menu, but I can't find it.

I want FF3 to remove downloads from the list once they finish downloading. Is there an about:config setting I can use for this?

Maybe this?

In the Privacy tab:

Under "History"

uncheck "Remember what I downloaded"

just installed FF3, and hate to say I regret it. the new "awesome bar" not only has a stupid name, it sucks big time. case in point: I start typing "b" in the address bar, and instead of seeing domains that start with b sorted by most frequently accessed (e.g. "bargainshare.com"), I get random bookmark/history results that have a "b" in the title somewhere.

I have to say, I like being able to search my history in the address bar like that, but I want it to be a choice. I'm so used to accessing commonly visited web sites by typing the first one or two characters, which is now completely thrown off. and apparently you can't turn it off.

edit: after using a bit more, it seems like it's re-learning urls I frequently visit and adjusting the sites it returns as a result. so it's better, but still should be a separate feature.

Firefox 3.0.2 contains the following updates:

• Fixed several security issues.
• Fixed several stability issues.
• Official releases for Sinhala and Slovene are now available.
• Beta releases for Bengali, Galician, Hindi, Icelandic, Kannada, Marathi, Telugu, and Thai are available for testing.
• Fixed a number of minor issues with the layout of certain web pages.
• Fixed several theme issues that affected right-to-left locales.
• Fixed issue that caused some users with customized toolbars to have their Back and Forward buttons go missing (bug 426026)
• Add new Extended Validation (EV) roots to Firefox 3.0.2.
• On certain IDN sites, the password manager would not fill in username and password details properly.
• Fixed several hangs and crashes that occurred when using screen readers.
• Fixed Mac-specific issues:
  • Keyboard shortcuts would stop working in some cases.
  • Japanese, Korean, Chinese and Indic characters can not be entered (using IME) into text fields in Flash objects (bug 357670)
  • Firefox 3.0.1 could not be used when the user profile is stored on an AFP directory (bug 417037)

firefox 3.05 avaiable now.