Firefox 3.5 Available In Fedora Repositories

The full release of Firefox 3.5 is now available in the software updater application. Fedora 11 was released with Firefox-3.5b4 which was one of the last beta releases. If you are running Fedora you can now update using the Add/Remove Software tool or Yum. I have not checked other distros but I'm sure they are updating as well given the popularity of Firefox especially in the Linux community.

6 More Days For Special Windows 7 Offer

I know this is a little late but when something like this pops up you have to tell folks about it. If you have any desire to upgrade to Windows 7 this may be the time to order. Read all the details on the Microsoft Windows Blog about the offer. The following is from the blog:

"Finally, as a way of saying thank you to our loyal Windows customers, we are excited to introduce a special time limited offer! We will offer people in select markets the opportunity to pre-order Windows 7 at a more than 50% discount. In the US, this will mean you can pre-order Windows 7 Home Premium for USD $49.99 or Windows 7 Professional for USD $99.99. You can take advantage of this special offer online via select retail partners such as Best Buy or Amazon, or the online Microsoft Store (in participating markets)."

Lately I have been concentrating on Firefox and Linux so it was easy for me to let this news slip by. Personally I have no intention of upgrading to Windows 7 until I buy a new laptop. I don't see any reason to updgrade until there are benefits for my equipment. Your milage may vary so if you were or are planning to upgrade you might want to consider this offer.

Firefox Downloads Surpass 12 Million Worldwide

This is really cool a real-time map and graph of Firefox downloads. The USA leads the way with over 2 million downloads as I write this. I find this very interesting in the gee-wiz category. How high will it reach after one week?

Xmarks Available For IE

Now I admit this isn't headline news any longer. It has been available since April 3, 2009 but I just discovered it tonight. I use several different computers from the three I have here at home to all the ones I use at work. On some machines my bookmarks are lengthy and well organized. On others they are a complete mess. What a pain, ugh. Why I never searched for a solution before will always remain a mystery. At work I use IE only to see sites as most of my customers will see them. I still feel the need to keep up to speed with IE since I do provide support for end users. But at home I am almost exclusive to Firefox (also use Seamonkey which is based on Firefox). In comes Xmarks also formally known as Foxmarks providing a tool to sync all my browsers on all the machines I use everyday.

Update Firefox 3.5

Okay I have been using Firefox 3.5 now for a couple of days now and I like what I see. It is snappy and has fast page loads while using Linux and a 54g wireless connection. Two of the three extensions that had reported as not compatible have updated. If you are new to Firefox or want to learn some new tricks, check out the tips and tricks page from Mozilla. There are tips for newbies to advanced users. I really like the built-in site checker. In my opinion this is a better implementation for checking websites than Microsoft's phishing filter. How many times have you closed a tab on accident? I know I do it all the time. With 3.5 you no longer have to go into your history list to re-open the site. Simply use the control + shift + t keys and the last closed tab re-opens. There are more new features than I have had time to try. Check out the tips page an see which ones you will like and use.

Update Firefox 3.5 Install To Linux

I was right about one thing and that is someone would publish what we need to get Firefox running in some Linux distro. Lifehacker comes to the rescue and pointed me to a blog, Kabatology, I would have probably never found. I will have to explore this site more fully as it looks to be rich in content. I am using Firefox 3.5 right now from the download I made the other day. I tried then to run Firefox using the ~/firefox/firefox command, but it failed each time in Mepis. In AntiX after navigating to the /home/firefox directory, I just double-clicked on the shell script file firefox and I now had Firefox running. Kabatology mentions the same command but also gave alternatives to starting Firefox in Ubuntu. One of which was double-clicking the firefox script file. Their tip was for Ubuntu and since Ubuntu is Debian based, as is Mepis and AntiX, I knew it would work for me too. I didn't have to run the wget command since I had previously downloaded Firefox. So many thanks to the Lifehacker team for finding the tip and thanks to Kabatology for sharing their knowledge.

Linux Distros Lagging In Package Updates For Firefox 3.5

I must say that I'm quite disappointed that I haven't been able to update to Firefox 3.5 in Mepis or Fedora. I've been touting the flag for these distros pretty high and I really thought I would at least see the Fedora 3.5 beta have an update available. But I ran apt-get update on Mepis and no new Firefox. Tried a yum update for Fedora and the same results. If I tried for just the package I would get no package available nothing to do. This was very frustrating since I know the Linux version is on Mozilla's website ready to go. In their support pages Mozilla does mention that the various distros do control the version upgrades for Firefox. Even the update now feature is locked out. I even checked the about:config file and it was locked there as well. I downloaded the Linux version but I can't do anything with it. I haven't given up. My guess is others are having the same trials and soon a Google search will turn up the methods. For now I rant and tomorrow I will test it out on Windows XP. I haven't had the time to even test drive it in Windows. Anyone using 3.5 now? What do you like about the new release? Did they leave out something you want?