Jun 11
Firefox 3 Download Leaked Early in Ubuntu Hardy
Well, it’s all but confirmed now. With Firefox 3 download day set to hit any time this month, it looks like the Firefox developers are preparing. As a result, it appears that the final release of Firefox 3 hit the hardy-proposed repository this morning. I installed the update, and am running it now. Check it out:
And you can see the version string through Synapic Package Manager:
The latest in hardy-updates is “3.0~rc1+nobinonly-0ubuntu1″, but this version string is “3.0+nobinonly-0ubuntu0.8.04.1″, clearly lacking any “release candidate” tag. Could this be the real deal? It was probably uploaded in an effort to make sure that Ubuntu users are able to access it in hardy-updates on release day, so they have a better chance at their world record.
If you want to download this pre-release for yourself, all you need to do is enable the hardy-proposed repository:
- Go to System > Administration > Sofware Sources
- Click on the “Updates” tab, and make sure the box for “Unsupported Updates” is checked
- Press “Close”, and let the package manager refresh.
Afterwards, you should see the update icon in your taskbar, with the latest Firefox 3 ready to go! Note, however, that the hardy-proposed repository does contain *unsupported* updates. To be on the safe side, you should disable it after you install Firefox.
Has anyone else been running Firefox 3 yet? Have you noticed any differences? Mine feels a little faster, although that may be due to the fact that a few extensions are still incompatible.
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June 11th, 2008 at 3:07 pm
Nice find. I am definitely checking this out asap. I wonder if they will pull this since it isn’t officially released. Get it while it’s hot!
June 11th, 2008 at 7:40 pm
That’s Firefox 3 RC1 they’re offering — actually two releases behind Firefox RC3 that you can get directly from Mozilla today. The official release from Mozilla will be happening next Tuesday and you can expect Ubuntu to have an update then or soon after but what you’re seeing now is most definitely not Firefox 3 final and it’s not even as current as you could be if you got your bits directly from Mozilla.
June 11th, 2008 at 8:26 pm
Hmm, it definitely seems peculiar the version strings that they are using though. In the “officially supported” hardy-updates repository, we have:
3.0~rc1+nobinonly-0ubuntu1
compared with the unsupported pre-release repository, hardy-proposed, which has:
3.0+nobinonly-0ubuntu0.8.04.1
It seems very misleading on the part of Ubuntu to have such similar package names, with the biggest difference the lack of “rc1″ in the tag. Perhaps they were trying a little too hard to be on top of things when the final version is released, and didn’t expect RC3 that came out today. But on the other side, it also seems unusual that the Firefox “about” box doesn’t have any mention of RC. Nor does running “firefox –version” from the command line.