Some other annoying bugs have been resolved, from the release notes:

• Fixed an issue introduced in Firefox 3.0.11, where Firefox would occasionally freeze when accessing the Java plug-in on Windows XP. (bug 498132)
• Fixed an issue introduced in Firefox 3.0.11, where Firefox would not save data properly when a user stored their home directory on a remote location using AFP. (bug 497792)
• On Mac OS X, fixed an issue where certain AppleScripts failed to return the proper information. (bug 427448)

If you are still on the Firefox 3.0.x branch, you will be prompted for the updated within the next 48 hours, or you can manually do it selecting Check for Updates… in the Help menu.

You may also want to consider jumping to Firefox 3.5.1 now. According to Mozilla support policies, updates will be provided until January 2010.

Among stability improvements several bugs related to the SQLite powered Firefox storage system have been patched to prevent some conditions that may result in a corrupted Library.

To update just select Check for Updates… in the Help menu.

A number of stability improvements are also available, including one for a particularly annoying bug that may disable the File menu items after selecting the Print… option from it.

This update is available in three new languages: Estonian, Kannada and Telugu, taking Firefox’s international reach to 58 languages with four others in beta stage.

To get the update now, select Check for Updates… in the Help menu.

For complete details, check Firefox 3.0.7 release notes.

To update, select Check for Updates… in Firefox’s help menu and follow the onscreen instructions.

Remember that you may need to tell your firewall to allow the updated Firefox executable to access the Internet.

For starters, in Firefox 3, enter about:robots in the location bar and press Enter. Here’s what you’ll see:

The page contents are some other famous robot related quotes:

• The page title, “Gort! Glaatu barada nikto!”, is a  quote from The day the earth stood still.
• “Robots may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.”, is the first law of robotics, according to Isaac Asimov, the late science fiction author.
• “Robots have seen things you people wouldn’t believe”, is an adapted quote of Roy Batty, in Blade Runner.
• “Robots are your plastic pals it’s fun to be with”, from  Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.
• “Robots have shiny metal posteriors that shouldn’t be bitten.”, a quote from Bender (Futurama)

There’s also a button and a warning which is left to you to find out about.

Firefox 3 development presented a brief epic story involving the robot and Gran Paradiso, an imaginary city named after Firefox 3 code name. The story unfolded in Beta 2, 3, 4 and 5s first run pages.

Finally, Mozilla has released several posters featuring the robot: The original robot poster for Firefox 3.0 release, available at the Mozilla Store. Then came the Mozilla Summit poster, and the I Survived the Summit sticker followup. More recently, the robot went to Barcelona for MozCamp 2008 and another poster.

Firefox 3.1 development also features a giant robot so it seems we’ll have plenty of robots for the foreseeing future.

Firefox 3.0.5 is the first release with no EULA presented during the setup. As introduced in Firefox 3.1 Beta 2, an information bar is presented on first run with a button that displays the special about:rights page with details about Firefox’s open source license, trademarks, liabilities, and privacy policies.

With the addition of  Bengali, Esperanto, Galicia, Hindi, and Latvian localizations, Firefox is now available in about 60 languages.

To update, just wait for the prompt to appear in the next 48 hours, or select Check for Updates… in the Help menu.

Note that if you are using a firewall it will most likely require your approval to let the updated Firefox access the Internet. For more information, check Cannot connect after upgrading Firefox at Mozilla Support Knowledge Base (uh, before updating).

As usual, this release brings several stability and performance bug fixes, as well as, according to the release notes, some security patches. Details of the security vulnerabilities have not been disclosed as of this post.

Also notable in this release is the availability of two new languages: Icelandic and Thai. Bulgarian, Esperanto, Estonian, Latvian, Occitan, and Welsh are also in the works and available for general testing.

To update, select Check for Updates… in the Help menu and follow the onscreen instructions.

Note that if you are using a firewall it will most likely require your approval to let the updated Firefox access the Internet. For more information, check Cannot connect after upgrading Firefox at Mozilla Support Knowledge Base (uh, before updating).

Update: Security fixes details available now: 4 critical, 2 high, 2 moderate, and 1 low impact. Update now.

On the other side, people are crying foul because it can accidentally reveal a web page (porn, secret gift, Oprah, etc.) they don’t want others to know about. Or because they don’t like its look or takes too much space. Or because they found confusing the change of behavior. There are some workarounds available and Firefox 3.1 will provide more customization options, but still this could be not enough.

So, how is it going for you? Share your experience in the latest Mozilla Links poll and feel free to drop your comments below.

The update includes fixes for three critical vulnerabilities including the one reported through TippingPoint’s Zero Day Initiative program, the same day Firefox 3 was released, that could lead to remote execution.

Another bug is related to GIF images handling on Mac OS X that could also lead to remote execution; while the third one would allow an attacker to launch Firefox with certain unfiltered chrome addresses .

You should be prompted to update in the next 48 hours but if you want to get it now, select Check for Updates… in the Help menu and follow the on-screen instructions.

Links and Forms, a Firefox extension developed by Florian Queze, restores both pages to the Page Info dialog just as they were in Firefox 2 and previous versions.

You can get Links and Forms from Mozilla Add-ons. It’s still labeled as experimental so you will need a Mozilla Add-ons account to install it.

Thanks to CFox for the tip!

Bonus tip: If you use the Page Info dialog a lot, you may want to add a button to open it to the toolbar or bring the original Ctrl + I shortcut back. To get back both, install Page Info Button. Hope to see a status bar icon option soon.

Stephen Colbert: Believe me, I’m all in favor of scaring the shit out of public. But I don’t understand. You give me the tools to frighten them.

Johnathan Zittrain: I don’t mean to be too alarmist…

SC: Oh! No, no, no! Please!

JZ: But it’s true. If you visit the wrong web site with the wrong browser, that could be it.

SC: What’s the right browser?

JZ: Well, Firefox 3 was just released today.

SC: OK.

(Public applause)

JZ: You may want to give it a shot.

SC: Firefox 3 gets the Colbert bump.

(Public applause)

The Colbert bump, -sort of a small digg effect or being slashdotted- actually spiked Firefox 3 download rate for a few minutes, according to Mozilla’s Ken Kovash, based on in his analysis of Mozilla download logs.

To play, just select Your SUDOKUs sidebar from the View/Sidebars menu. Select a puzzle from the sidebar and click on >> to open it in a new tab. To place a number, you click on it from the bottom number bar and then on an empty space. The selected number will be highlighted on the board to help you avoid errors. If you’re not sure, right click to place the number as a hint instead.

It helps identify errors like a number repeated in the same column, row or square, highlighting them all as soon as you place the duplicate.

Sudoku ships with 65 puzzles (40 easy, 5 medium and 20 hard), but one of its main features is the ability to grab other puzzles from well known sudoku web sites including WebSudoku, Sudoku Puzzles,  Sudoku online, and a few others.

You simply visit the site and Sudoku will detect the puzzle and prompt whether you want to play it now with the enhanced interface ir provides or save it to play it later. Saved puzzles are stored in the Unrated category.

An option to pause a puzzle and continue it later is planned and will be very welcomed. I would also like to see thumbnails of the puzzles as a the mouse cursor passes over them in the sidebar and a way to turn off the tips displayed at the bottom.

Sudoku is a very nice extension, with some rough edges still there. But minor bugs aside, what it needs is some eye candy to make it more enjoyable and playful.

sudoku 0.9 is available from Mozilla Add-ons as an experimental extension so you will need a Mozilla Add-ons account to access and install it.

1. Duplicate tabs. Press Ctrl while dragging a tab to create a duplicate of the dragged tab including its history. Note that this feature doesn’t work on Mac.
2. Move tabs to another window. Just drag a tab and drop it on another window to move it. If the dragged tab is the last one in its window, it will be closed.
3. Resize the search bar. When the search bar is placed next to the location bar, you can drag the handler between them (invisible on Windows and Linux) to resize it.
4. Add keyword search. Select Manage Search Engines… in the search engines menu to open the Search Engines Manager, select a search engine, press Edit Keyword… and enter a few characters to define one. Now you can enter the keyword followed by your search terms in the location bar to search with that plugin.
5. Discontinuous selections. Make a selection with the mouse as you usually do. Then press and hold the Ctrl (Cmd on Mac) key to make additional selections and create a larger discontinuous one so you can copy or print just what you need.
6. Integrated add-ons. No need to visit Mozilla Add-ons because Firefox 3 brings it to you directly from the Add-ons Manager new Get Add-ons page: search, find and install with a single click.
7. Disable plugins. Crashing? It may be a plugin. To be sure, disable the suspect through the new Plugins page in the Add-ons Manager.
8. Check your crashes. Enter about:crashes in the location bar to get a list of crashes submitted by Breakpad (Mozilla’s crash reporter). Click on a crash report to get details provided by Socorro, Mozilla’s crash reports server.

If you are feeling envious of what the other platform or style got or just want to try a different look and have a couple of minutes to spare, you may want to give these themes a try.

Vista on XP, is a theme by Pascal Herbert that lets you use the Windows Vista theme, which is pretty much like the XP theme except all main navigation bar icons are blue and glassy instead of plastic-y.

If you prefer XP’s green plastic, try XP on Vista by the same author.

MacOS X Theme, created by GOLF-AT, brings Firelight’s brushed metal to users in Linux and Windows platforms. You will need a Mozilla Add-ons account though, as it is labeled experimental and awaiting further reviews.

Finally, if you don’t like change and believe Firefox 2 theme was just perfect, there’s also a theme for you: Firefox 2 for Firefox 3 will make you feel as it is 2006 again, yellow location bar for secure sites included.

Enjoy!

You can take advantage of Firefox 3’s support for web-based protocol handling to make it your default IRC client and handle irc:// links whenever you found one.

Mibbit added the necessary interface short before Firefox 3 final release and I’ve proposed it to be included with Firefox by default. But you can add it right now.

First, you will have to enable registration of protocol web handlers from different domains.

• Enter about:config in the location bar and press Enter to access the advanced preferences.
• Look for gecko.handlerService.allowRegisterFromDifferentHost and double click it to set it to true.

Now click in the link below to add Mibbit as an irc: links handler.

Add Mibbit as an IRC handler

You will be prompted with a confirmation info bar. Press Add Application.

You can now select Mibbit as your irc:// links handler from the Application page in the Options dialog.

Now when you click on irc: links a new tab with Mibbit and a tab connected to the IRC server and channel.

I suggest setting gecko.handlerService.allowRegisterFromDifferentHost back to false to prevent malicious web sites offering their own protocol handlers.

In case you need to remove Mibbit as an irc:// handler, go back to the Applications page in the Options dialog. Look for irc in the content type column. Open the menu in the Action column and select Application Details…, select Mibbit and press Remove.

The Official Mozilla Blog mentions 8,002,530 people downloading Firefox 3, but I guess it must be a typo since the record is about number of downloads which can’t be easily translated to number of people.

Anyway, the record has been set and Guinness will present the World Record certificate next week in London.

What do you want to see available next at the Mozilla Store? A $10 Firefox-themed laptop skin? A $15 Mozilla themed Rubik’s cube featuring the Firefox, Thunderbird, SeaMonkey, Camino and other logos? What about a $17 Firefox logo frisbee? Or an ultra-cool $35 flash drive featuring the Firefox 3 robot?

I’m all for the Rubik’s cube but hope the robot gets one of the faces. $35 for a 1GB flash drive seems steep even for a Firefox 3 robot flash drive. Unless there is a 4GB Corsair Survivor under the hood.

Head over now to the latest Mozilla Store poll and get what you want. It only runs until tomorrow June 24 11:59pm PST.

In case you haven’t noticed, the Firefox 3 T-shirt is already available for chicos y chicas.

Today, Illiad is back on it with a reference to Firefox 3 download record.

Check UserFriendly.org for more smiles and better resolution images.

Via Al Billings’blog.

If for some reason you prefer to see the location and tab bars, you can customize Firefox:

• Enter about:config in the location bar to access the advanced preferences.
• Look for browser.fullscreen.autohide and double click it to set it to false.

Or you can just turn off the toolbars slide up animation:

• Look for browser.fullscreen.animateUp, right-click, select Modify and enter 0.

As with all advanced preferences you can reset them to their default values right-clicking and selecting Reset from the context menu.

Just in case, you enter full screen mode pressing F11 or selecting Full Screen in Firefox’s View menu.

Looking forward to meet a lot of local Firefox fans there and share ideas for promoting Firefox locally.

El sábado a las 8 en Telemundo!

Look for a party near you at Mozilla Party Central.

Join the Firefox 3 launch celebration with one of two high resolution images recently released by Mozilla.

The first one, features the Firefox robot in victorious pose with pieces of past robot scenes in the background, Firefox praise at the bottom mimicking a movie poster, actually inspired by an Indiana Jones poster.

The second one is to celebrate Mozilla’s 10th anniversary and is based in the original Mozilla communism-inspired theme. Also available in a variety of desktop wallpapers.

Almost all of the online photo printing service already offer poster printing so you can get a neat hanging evidence of your own coolness. Or just print it yourself!

Via John Slater’s Into The Fuzz.

Following their own policies, Tipping Point has not disclosed any details about the vulnerability besides it would require user interaction, while Mozilla works on a patch. Mozilla Security reports that there is no known public exploit for this bug at this time.

Once the patch gets landed it will most likely be distributed via Mozilla Update Service as Firefox 3.0.1. Plans for 3.0.1 already include a few dozen stability and performance bug fixes but I wouldn’t be surprised if Mozilla rushes a security update ahead of the usual 4-6 weeks cycle, if it deems the bug severe enough.

1. If you just want to zoom text, in the View menu, select Zoom and mark Zoom Text Only.

2. Firefox 3 remembers what zoom level you used for viewing pages in a domain and will automatically zoom them the next time you visit any page in the same domain. If you prefer Firefox not to remember it:

• In the location bar, enter about:config to access the advanced preferences
• Look for browser.zoom.siteSpecific and double click it to set it to false.

3. Another change you may quickly notice is that in Firefox 3 pressing Ctrl (or Cmd on Mac) and scrolling up and down, zooms the page in and out, unlike Firefox 2 and previous versions which used to work the opposite way.

4. By default when you press Ctrl + = and Ctrl + - to zoom in or out a page (Cmd + = on Mac), Firefox magnifies to 30%, 50%, 67%, 80%, 90%, 100%, 110%, 120%, 133%, 150%, 170%, 200%, 240% and 300%. If you want to define more or less fine steps or need to zoom to larger levels you can customize Firefox full page zoom:

• Enter about:config in the location bar to access the advanced preferences.
• Look for toolkit.zoomManager.zoomValues and replace the default values with your preferences. For example to set quicker values like 10%, 50%, 100%, 200%, 300% and 500% you will need to enter .1,.5,1,2,3,5.
• You will also need to increase the default 300% zoom in level. Look for zoom.maxPercent and set it to 500 to match the highest step set above.
• You may need to to do the same with the lower limit. Look for zoom.minPercent and set it to 10 to match the lowest step set above.

Note that the zoom steps only affect zooming in and out with the keyboard or via View>Zoom>Zoom In/Zoom Out. Mouse scroll zooming uses its own steps but respects the maximum and minum zoom levels.

Also there seems to be no limit to the zoom level. I was able to set a 5000% cap and get a ridiculously large page.

An option to restore its old behavior was available for a few weeks during Firefox 3 development but it was pulled basically because it would need a lot of testing and it was thought it was not worth it. The option may come back for Firefox 3.1.

In the meantime, for those who prefer the old way and those who want even more power, here are 9 easy tweaks you can try.

1. Make the autocomplete menu show only typed addresses and not visited or bookmarked

• Enter about:config in the location bar to access the advanced preferences. Accept the “This may void your warranty message”.
• Look for browser.urlbar.matchOnlyTyped and double click it to set it to TRUE.

2. To set the autocomplete menu to single line suggestions install the oldbar extension, developed by Seth Spitzer. Together with the previous tweak pretty much restores Firefox 2 behavior, except typed characters are searched in all the address instead of just the beginning.

3. Change the number of suggestions displayed in the autocomplete menu

• Enter about:config in the location bar to access the advanced preferences.
• Look for browser.urlbar.maxRichResults and set it to the number of results you want to get.
• Restart Firefox for the change to take effect.

4. Hide the star button if you prefer to use the Bookmarks menu or a keyboard shortcut (Ctrl + D)

• Open your userChrome.css file located in your profile folder.
• Add this line to the end of the file: #star-button {display: none !important;}
• Restart Firefox for the change to take effect.

5. Always show the Go button. By default it is only displayed when you are editing the current web address.

• Open your userChrome.css file located in your profile folder.
• Add this line to the end of the file: #go-button { visibility: visible !important; }
• Restart Firefox for the change to take effect.

6. If you enter firfox in the location bar and you try to correct it, the autocomplete menu won’t suggest anything because it only keeps working as you edit the last characters. Install the Edit Middle extension, developed by harikaried, to make it work with edits anywhere.

7. To auto select the first suggestion in the autocomplete menu, install the Enter Selects extension, developed by harikaried. You will need to logon to Mozilla Add-ons to install it as it’s still experimental.

8. Tweak the autocomplete menu title and addresses size and colors by adding these lines to your userChrome.css file. Check for the specific hexadecimal color code to use at WebMonkey.

.ac-comment {font-size: 100% !important; color: #444444 !important; }

.ac-comment[selected='true'] { color: #FFFFFF !important; }

.ac-url-text {font-size: 100% !important; color: #000077 !important; }

.ac-url-text[selected='true'] { color: #FFFFFF !important; }

9. To include Google and Amazon search results in the autocomplete menu install the Searchery extension, developed by Ian McKellar. You will need to logon to Mozilla Add-ons to install it as it’s still experimental.

10. Bonus tip courtesy of Frederick from the comments: To hide the web feed icon from the location bar, add this line to your userChrome.css file: #feed-button[feeds] { display: none !important; }

Happy tweaking!

Thanks Jens, Marius, and Marcelo for the suggestions and corrections which work better indeed. There were unwanted spaces and wrong quotes in the original post but have now been corrected.

8′290,908 is the exact number of Firefox 3 downloads, give or take a few thousands, with a strong 12 thousand downloads per minute rate at the time the mark was crossed.

In fact, the push was so hard that NetApplications reports it moved the market share needle by about 2% for Firefox 3: from around 1% early in the morning to about 3% by late at night.

Unsurprisingly, the United States is the country generating the most downloads with about 2.5 million, followed by Germany, Japan, Spain, the UK, France, Canada, Brazil, China and Turkey.

The number has yet to be validated by Guinness officials and hopefullly it will be included in the next printed edition of the Guinness World Records.

Edit: Poland, Lituania, Iran and Italy, all have more downloads than China and Turkey. I initially thought the list included the top 10 countries but it’s not the case. Thanks Paul for the heads up.