David Johnson's Blog

Well it’s been a while, loyal readers, but here I am blogging again. Bloglines tells me I have four subscribers, and presumably there’s also some people out there subscribing through Google Reader and other means, so I guess I have some sort of duty to post stuff…

Anyway, I had to jump on the Firefox 3 bandwagon and help with the target of breaking the world record for most downloads in a day – actually there is no record, this’ll be the first, but Firefox 2.0 got 1.6 million downloads on the day of release so I guess they’ll be looking to exceed that.

I must say that I wasn’t actually going to download it today, I was going to wait until it arrived in Debian, but after reading about some of the new features earlier today I decided I had to give it a go.

The only thing I’ve really noticed so far is that pages load/render much quicker. As an example, I use MythTV’s MythWeb application to allow me to view the program guide without having to turn my head 15° and look at the TV. Under Firefox 2.x, it took a good few seconds to load as it’s a very complicated page with an awful lot of content. Under Firefox 3.0, it’s instant. Literally. Very cool.

The other feature I’m expecting to be useful is the ’smart location bar’, which means that soon as you start typing a URL in the location bar it will search through not only the URLs, but also the titles of previous sites you’ve visited to help you find the site you’re looking for. Pretty good if you’ve forgotten the URL of the site, but can remember the name.

However there is one very unfortunate problem I have with Firefox 3.0 – it refuses to let me access my website. Seriously. Every other website in the world, including my other websites, work fine but it won’t let me access this one – it just says it couldn’t look-up the domain. However my old version of Firefox, which I’m using now, works just fine. Maybe Firefox 3 has some kind of clever crap filter, designed to stop users being exposed to drivel like this….