Firefox has been making me scratch my head a little lately - FF2 recently updated me - quite automatically - to a beta version, then I find FF3 beta bundled into the new release of Ubuntu Linux.
This is not how I previously experienced the Open-Source world to work. It’s not uncommon for a fairly young project to exist only in beta - but for a mature one, I thought beta versions - although available to anyone, were not released generally, but rather, to that community of interested and enthusiastic users best positioned to test and feed back on any remaining bugs and issues.
Has something changed recently in the Open-Source world as a whole? or are these incidents of premature general release just exceptions? or am I just wrong about how it’s supposed to work?
I’m running ubuntu 8.04 on this laptop. I update it daily, and at some point switched to Firefox 3 without even noting it. I just checked this a.m. to see if I should go download it. Can’t get more seamless than that, right?
I’m pretty sure it came bundled with the upgrade to 8.04. I uninstalled it and went back to 2.0 - at least for the moment.
Point is, you seamlessly switched from 2.0 to 3.0 beta. That just shouldn’t happen automatically, IMO.
I found the font rendering a bit gritty and the ‘awesome bar’ just didn’t invoke anything approaching awe, to me. Maybe it will grow on me (actually, I hope it can be turned off).