Firefox 3 Launch Day

It’s finally Firefox download day. Firefox 3 was set to launch at 10am PDT, but it seems that the Mozilla web site has gone down under the strain from everyone hitting the site. I would guess it won’t take too long before Mozilla has the site back up and running, but it’s an hour and 15 minutes after 10am PDT.

At first the site was being slow about coming up, but is now giving an HTTP unavailable message.

2:55 PM EST: Finally got it downloaded. Seems to be running well. From what I can see, the final release has the same build number as the RC 3 release.

2:49 PM EST: Looks like it’s up now. The download link has been changed to version 3. I’m downloading it now.

2:42 PM EST: This is suppose to be the download counter: http://downloadcounter.sj.mozilla.com/

2:35 PM EST: Looks like the site is slowly coming back up. The main page has changed, but the links are still point to Firefox 2. I just checked my email and the email from Mozilla has arrived. So the actual download day may just be starting a little later than planned.

2:30 PM EST: Finally a new page has come up. There is a Firefox 3 logo on the screen, but the download links still point to 2.0.0.14.

2:28 PM EST: I refreshed the page and got a blue bar across the top this time.

2:16 PM EST: From what I’m hearing, the RC3 release of Firefox 3 is identical to the final release of Firefox 3. I’m not 100% sure this is true, and I won’t really know for sure until I can download it directly from Mozilla.

2:15 PM EST: The site now seems to be coming up, but it is still displaying the Firefox 2 download link.

Firefox 3 Bookmarks and the AwesomeBar

So Firefox 3 is now in beta 5, and it is very impressive. The new version of Firefox includes many improvments, and the addition of some new features.

Bookmarks:

Firefox 3 introduces a new, one-click way to bookmark pages and keep trak of your bookmarks. Check out this article on Dria.org:

Firefox 3 Bookmarks

The AwesomeBar

The new AwesomeBar truly is awesome:

Firefox 3 AwesomeBar

Firefox 3 also has a more Mac-like interface than previous versions of Firefox. I’ve been using the OS X version and I’m very pleased with it.

Review Of The Asus Eee PC

The new Asus Eee PC, which was released recently, is a tiny, and I mean tiny mobile computer. It sports a 7 inch screen, 4 GB internal flash storage (which can be expanded via an SD card), 512 MB of RAM, and no optical drive. The Eee PC also touts its own customized version of Xandros Linux, which is based off Debian. Ars Technica has a full review of this small critter from top to bottom.

Eeextremely Eenticing: a review of the Asus Eee PC

Acer buys Gateway

It was bound to happen eventually. I figured either Gateway would be bought by someone, or they would just slowly disappear (much like their stores did). Acer only paid $710 million for Gateway. That’s saying something.

I never really liked Gateway computers. My parents were looking into buying one a long time ago. That was the only time I ever set foot into one of those Gateway stores. I can’t recall exactly why they didn’t buy a computer from them. I was never really a fan of Gateway to begin with.

I have purchased some Acer machines, and I’ve been really impressed with them. Their monitors are also really nice. I’m kind of interested to see if they’ll keep the Gateway name, or just change it over to Acer.

Read the article here.

Skype Outage

So I read this morning that there was some kind of mass Skype outage last week. I don’t use Skype myself, but I was shocked to read that such a major service was down. I have used Skype in the past, and I have to say that it is a great service. That’s why I was so shocked to hear that it went down.

According to the different articles I read, the outage was due to hundreds of Windows computers rebooting after an update. I’m guessing after the update, the computers just rebooted, then Skype auto-launched, creating a huge hit on the Skype network. The outage lasted for about 36 hours. People who are addicted to Skype (and I know they’re out there) must have gone into withdraw or something. That’s a long time for a major service to be out of commission.

The Skype network can apparently do some self-healing, but the mass reboot hit some kind of flaw in the software design. It looks like everything is worked out now, and people can get back to Skype.