Nick Eff (![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} 2ce) wrote,@ 2008-05-17 13:04:00 |
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| Current music: | Nirvana—Territorial Pissings |
| Entry tags: | mozilla |
Firefox 3 Release Candidate 1
It's Firefox, it's fresh, and it's basically done. ("RC1" means that if nothing comes up during the shake-out period, this is the actual file that will be released as "Firefox 3." Something will probably come up. I still consider it solid enough to upgrade the parents.)
Back in the dim and distant past, on the eve of Firefox 1's release, there was a roadmap for three future versions of the app. Version 1.1 was to be a touch-up release, which made fixes and updated the Gecko engine while keeping the features and look mostly the same. 1.5 would be a medium-grade update, using the same engine as 1.1 but adding a nice pile of new features. And then there was Firefox 2.0, the major, revolutionary release. It would be built on a version of Gecko that didn't exist yet and have features that weren't possible without it, with an entirely new graphics layer, an undreamt-of speed boost, and a whole lot of things the developers had wanted all along but couldn't get.
Ultimately, for various reasons, the version numbers were all pushed forward a notch: 1.1 became 1.5, etc. But the reason I bring up those old-ass (2004?) numbering predictions is that this release -- Firefox 3 -- is what became of that original, grail-like vision of "2.0." The last two releases were both evolutionary: visible improvements, but fairly pedestrian ones. This is the version that, right from the start, was intended to be The New Hotness.
It is.
