I’ve been a big fan of the Firefox browser since (probably before) v1.0. Yesterday, they finally officially released v3.0. I had heard that sometime last week the last release candidate started reporting itself as v3.0 (not v3.0RC3), so several hours before the start of their well documented attempt to set a new “Guinness world record” for downloads in a 24-hour period, I went and grabbed RC3 and installed it (I later compared the MD5 with the “official release” and they were identical, so I guess I beat the rush). As I had anticipated, given all the hype, when the magic hour of 10:00PDT (13:00EDT, 17:00UTC), their servers melted down. My first thought was that all the hype was monumentally stupid if they hadn’t planned for a huge spike in traffic at the appointed hour. To their credit, after a few hours, they managed to get their servers stable enough that people could actually reach them consistently. The thing that I was most looking forward to was that FF3 is faster and uses fewer resources than 2.0.0.14 (which introduced a memory leak that was getting really annoying). I don’t really care that much for the new features, I just wanted my old reliable FF to run faster and not cause my laptop to start swapping after an hour or so. FF3 accomplishes that, so if you’re looking for a faster, smaller browser head over to getfirefox.com. Now my only question is will the linux version be able to do the MLB Gameday thing for the Reds games. For some reason, lately it hasn’t worked for me on my Ubuntu laptop (I could have sworn it worked at the beginning of the season, but…).