Firefox 3.1 targeted for year-end
NOT ONE to rest on its laurels following its successful rollout of Firefox 3 two weeks ago, Mozilla is proposing to release Firefox 3.1 as a fast-track update by about year-end 2008.
The company said at a Tuesday meeting that it wants to put out the alpha release of Firefox 3.1 next month and a beta version in August. If it can hold to its planned schedule, it plans to deliver the finished product either by year-end 2008 or early in the first quarter of 2009.
Mozilla planned Firefox 3.1 as a fast-track update to incorporate new features that weren't finished in time for inclusion in Firefox 3.0, but that were "nearly complete" according to Mike Schroepfer, Mozilla's VP of engineering. Firefox 3.0 took Mozilla more than a year and a half to finally complete following its release of the previous version, Firefox 2.0.
More than 21.8 million copies of Firefox 3.0 have been downloaded since its release June 17. µ
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I've just had to revert my Firefox installation from 3 to 2.0.0.14 because of usability and bug problems. I'm not going to bother going back to 3 until they iron out all the features that made my few days of using it hell.

Firefox 2 has a few bugs but it's no-where near as bad as 3. It's quite a relief to go back to it.

The totally unhelpful altered 'load all tab' behavior was a serious impediment to start with. Not just for me but many 'professional' users of the product 

Then the random crashes didn't help improve my humour. Nor did the loss of my favorite plug-in 'Translate'.

What finally clinched it was the 100% CPU and nearly non-responsive mouse on some animated GIFS. These GIFS work fine on 2.

Help on their website? You've got to be joking. There are literally thousands of problem reports and almost all ill-answered or ignored (Think Ubuntu help forum for the quality)

Nope. This is not a good product today and it's a shame it has been released with all these bugs mixed in with a lot of 'features' that get in the way of using it effectively.
There is a rather serious bug in version 3.x.

Even if you set it to erase all your tracks on exit, the data about your usage history it uses for "smart" browsing etc. cannot be erased.

See this link:

http://www.labnol.org/software/browsers/clear-firefox-web-browsing-history-cache/2468/

I went to print a web page the other day and FF 3.0 only printed the middle page of three.
IE did it OK and removed the background colour too.
Where have the printing options gone in FF?
21 million downloads, 3 people moaning at the Inq. Says it all really dunnit?
Firefox 3 works fine for me. I didn't notice any bugs or crashes so far. o.O

Strange.
@Firefox Privacy Problem

Use about:config to set browser.urlbar.maxRichResults to 0 (zero) and nothing is saved.
Upgraded from 2 on my work and home machine (each with 3 profiles) and all went perfectly, no problems at all. faultless upgrade in my book, especially for a .0 product.
The "privacy problem" D links to is not a problem at all -- it's a setting that's easily disabled via about:config (as the comments to the post he links to point out).
Haven't noticed any real problems here. It's a .0 product, meaning in the software world that it's really just one big beta. Has a few glitches, but fixes many problems I had with Firefox 2.x, so on the whole I'm pretty happy with it.

Hey, if you don't like Firefox, go use Opera. Or whatever you want. I did. I came back to Firefox. You might too. Or you might not. But I'm guessing that's why there are several choices out there to pick from.

Well Firefox may be faster at starting up and uses less memory. But why is so buggy?

It crashes far too often on me.

There may have been 20,000,000 downloads but how many uninstalls? 

I suspect quite a few....

I've gone back to 2.0.0.14
I may be only one person who downloaded the package. But I just informed my organisation to stay with FF2.
So that's 200+ PCs.

You know the old IT saying - Never use X.0 of anything? Well I should have listened.
Instead of using a broswer made by some people who can't get paid for the work they do, they must be pretty crap. Why not use a browser that is made by people who get paid, because they are professionals, Internet Explorer 7.

You get what you pay for.

IE is free too ;-)
Sure -- there is a way to disable it by setting a config:

The problem is, that is beyond the majority of users.

This feature should have been included in the Privacy panel. But it was not.

So a user have to go digging around the web to find references to it, and then implement it.

Great --- I will wait until Firefox 3.x have the feature implemented properly.

Just for argument's sake.... what % of people modify the default settings of their browser? Or just use it out of the box?

My bet: at least 60% never touch the factory settings, and fewer than 10% will bother to do a config: mod.

So it has to work right out of the box --- or at least be simply fixable.

Talk to me when release 3.1 or later is out... I have had it with 3.0 for now.

If Mozilla are not for profit, why do they need to meet deadlines and release versions according to a roadmap?

Why didn;t they just keep plodding away at Firefox 2 until it had all the things they wanted it to have, including the improved bookmark handling that didn't (half) appear until FF3?

Or why didn't they just slowly hack away on FF3 until it was what will become 3.1 and release it at the end of the year?

After all, it's not about the money or marketing windows, is it? It's about the betterment of mankind at whatever pace it takes...