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A lot of people are praising Firefox 3 and have been using it since the first beta. I recommended not to use it before. But now, the final version of Firefox 3 is only four days away, so the final version will be mostly the same as Release Candidate 3. However, RC 3 is still not ready, and made me go back to Firefox 2.

I installed Firefox 3 Release Candidate 3 yesterday, and have been using it most of yesterday and most of today. During these two days, I have found obvious and very annoying bugs that make it impossible for me to use it. Actually come to think of it, I don’t know if they are obvious, because I haven’t seen anyone else report these problems. But I don’t think they’re exclusive to my computer.

My first problem was with Google. Firefox 3 RC 3 didn’t seem to be accepting cookies from Google. How strange, because I haven’t changed absolutely anything on my computer except installing FF3. I checked on my other computer running FF2, and all was fine. The problem was that I had to log in each time I opened Firefox. It wouldn’t keep me logged in, it kept logging me out. And it was forgetting that my home page was set to iGoogle, as it wouldn’t load iGoogle unless I clicked the link from the Google classic home page. Every time I navigated away from Google and then back to it, it logged me out and took me to Google classic.

Another thing was plugins not working. I installed a beta version of FireFTP, but there was no replacement for Fasterfox. Firefox became notably slower without Fasterfox, even after tweaking the about:config settings.

Speaking of speed, it didn’t seem any faster in loading online apps like Gmail. It took the same amount of time to load Gmail, Digg, and other script-heavy sites. Add to this the lack of Fasterfox, and Firefox 3 RC3 became slower than Firefox 2, the opposite of what was supposed to happen.

Continuing on with the problems, when writing the previous post here on Wordplop, I noticed there was no spell check. They certainly didn’t take out the feature, which so many people praise and depend on, so it must be a bug. Once again I don’t know if it’s only happening on my computer or others’ too, but I haven’t seen any other complaints like this. I also found spell check not working on forums and basically anywhere where there is a text box. It was working in all of these places with FF2, so it’s definitely Firefox 3′s problem.

The last bug I took note of before I decided to uninstall RC3 was that pressing the “Enter” (or “Return”) key while in a text field makes the entire page scroll to the top. So when I was making that last post here, every time I hit “Enter” to make a new paragraph, the page jumped up. This was the last straw – I downloaded Firefox 2 and reinstalled it, deleting Firefox 3 RC 3.

These weren’t the only bugs or annoyances I found. There were also problems with history not being saved, toolbar clicks not registering, and toolbar submenus not opening on mouse hover.

I hope it’s not just me having these bugs, because then they will get fixed faster. These problems make it impossible to use Firefox daily. I really hope all of this gets fixed before release date, or I won’t be downloading Firefox 3.

There have been many articles where researchers stated that internet addiction is an actual form of addiction that needs to be treated. But can you really be addicted to the internet? I don’t think so.

First, the internet can have no direct physical or chemical affects on you. It can’t be compared to a drug which alters your brain chemically. The internet isn’t an object and can’t really be compared to other addictions. But let’s compare it to a television show.

Say you really like to watch South Park. You watch every single episode without missing it, even if it means not going out with friends. This doesn’t classify as a TV addiction.

The internet is filled with thousands of very good sites that you can spend countless hours on. I can spend all day just browsing Digg, but if I have something better to do, I do it. This wouldn’t make me an addict.

It is very easy to spend most of your day on the internet, simply because there’s so much to do, so many videos to watch, so many funny pics to see, forums to participate in, etc. If you spend a lot of time on the internet it doesn’t make you an addict.

If you do have an “addiction” to the internet, you have more problems than just with the internet. Sane, normal people don’t give up eating because they can’t walk away from their computers. So if you’re at that extreme, you have other issues.

I guess my point here is that “internet addiction” is made up. This isn’t a drug that you can get addicted to. These people are just trying to earn more money from drugs that they can sell to “internet addicts” to help their “problem”. There’s no such thing as internet addiction.

No, this isn’t a program you download that pretends to make your internet faster (and installs some malware as a bonus). I’m talking about using a button on your mouse to make your browsing many times faster.

All (I hope) computer mice these days come with a scroll wheel. Of course that scroll wheel is also a button. If you installed mouse drivers, this middle button can be configured to do anything you want, almost. So if you do have drivers installed, set the middle click to the “middle click” or “standard” (it will be different for different mice) option. If you don’t have drivers installed, you don’t need to change this.

So what is this all about? If you’re doing heavy web browsing, you can set your middle mouse button to open links in a background tab. How does this help with speed? The new pages you open load in the background, so when you’re done reading a page, you can just switch to the next tab and continue reading whatever you clicked on, without having to wait for it to load. Genius? I think so.

To do this in Firefox, simply click Tools > Options, click on the Tabs tab, and uncheck When I open a link in a new tab, switch to it immediately.

This will make new links open in background tabs, which also means they’re loading in the background. As for your middle mouse button, the default action for Firefox to take when you click a link with the middle mouse button is to open it in a new tab.

So now when you click a link with your middle mouse button, it will load in the background. This comes in really handy when browsing sites like Digg or just browsing forums. New pages or threads will load in the background as you are uninterruptedly browsing the home page, looking for more stuff to open.

Be sure to comment with any other quick and easy browsing tips.

Mozilla has just released Firefox 3 Release Candidate 3, available here. It looks like Firefox 3 is nearing completion and will be released very soon. There were predictions that Release Candidate 2 would be the last one before the final version, but it turns out it isn’t.

Seems that Mozilla is ironing out each and every single bug, meaning the final release of Firefox 3 will be stable and bug-free. Don’t forget to download the final version of Firefox 3 when it comes out on Firefox Download Day 2008.

Net Applications says that Firefox can have 20% of the browser market share as early as next month. Meanwhile, Internet Explorer’s market share continues to drop steadily.

This will be a major milestone for Firefox. If this 20% takeover will happen soon, it might as well happen on Download Day for Firefox. If Download Day succeeds, Firefox will also grab the world record for most software downloads in 24 hours.

Here at Wordplop, 49% of visitors use Firefox, 35% use Internet Explorer, 5% use Opera, and the remaining 11% use a variety of other browsers. These statistics are from the previous 16,000 unique visitors.

This will be good news for web developers as well. Firefox is much more standards compliant than Internet Explorer. Some standard code that works in all browsers just will not work in Internet Explorer. Most web developers hate Internet Explorer for that reason, so the more people that use Firefox, the better.

The only downside to this milestone might be that hackers will try harder to write malicious code that works with Firefox. Right now Firefox is much safer than Internet Explorer, but as it gains market share, it might become more vulnerable as more malicious code will be written for it. However, this is inevitable with all software, so it shouldn’t be worried about.

Congratulations to Mozilla and all Firefox developers for this soon-to-be milestone.

Mozilla has just released Firefox 3 RC 2 today. This will supposedly be the last version of Release Candidates for Firefox 3 that will be released before the final version.

Release Candidate 2 has fixed the major bugs that were seen in RC1. If no major bugs are found in Firefox 3 RC2, it will become Firefox 3.0 (final).

It is good to see that Mozilla won’t be rushing the release of Firefox 3, and will take the time it needs to iron out the bugs in the release candidates. This should make the final version of Firefox 3 as bug-free as possible.

Now all that’s left for me to make the switch to Firefox 3 is plugin compatibility. That’s the plugin creators’ problem. So a word to any plugin creators – update your plugins to work with Firefox 3 so everyone can download Firefox when it’s released.

British police are raiding the homes of former OiNK members. OiNK was a private file-sharing website targeted at sharing music. The police are only arresting people who uploaded pre-released albums, at least for now.

These OiNK members are being charged with “Conspiracy to Defraud the Music Industry” which sounds absurd if you ask me. The music industry is trying to label OiNK as a criminal organization full of terrorists, which I’m sure it wasn’t.

File sharing is just that – file sharing. It is not stealing, it is not defrauding. Most people who share these files wouldn’t have purchased them anyways. Of course I do not condone file sharing of any form – I’m just saying it’s not the same as walking into a store and stealing some CD’s.

So if you were a frequent uploader of pre-released albums on OiNK, you might be next.

Have you ever asked a friend where to get the latest Linux distro, and you were told to download it from a torrent and didn’t know what that meant? Well here is my guide on how to use torrents.

First, you will need a torrent website. If you are reading this you probably aren’t a member of any private sites, so use something like The Pirate Bay or Mini Nova.

Second, you need a program to use the torrents. I highly recommend uTorrent. Download and install the program. Now configure it properly by setting your internet connection speed and anything else it asks for.

Now do a search for what you are looking for on a torrent site, in this example being a Linux distro. Download the torrent and open it. uTorrent will open and begin downloading the torrent.

Here’s the tricky part for most people. The download might be going very slow. If it is, you need to open up your router configuration and unblock the port the torrent program is using. This will be different for every router and torrent application, so I can’t really help you here. Try a Google search if you’re not sure how to unblock a port in your router.

After your port is unblocked, the torrent should be going full speed, unless you picked a bad torrent. Try to pick the torrent with the most seeds. If it has a low number of seeds, like 20, it will go slow. Most of the time 50 or more seeds will be fast. Seeds are the number of people uploading the files.

Make sure you pick a torrent with good comments. Most torrent sites have comments for each torrent, so see what people are saying. People usually comment if there is a virus or if it’s a bad torrent. However, even if the comments are all good, you still need to scan what you download.

Make sure not to seed too fast. Configure your “up” speed to be around half of your real up speed. If you’re not sure what your upload speed is, for DSL set it to 10kbps, and for cable set it to 100kbps. You should seed until it shows 100% or more, and then you can stop seeding and delete the .torrent file. If you seed too fast, it will slow down your entire internet connection and your download.

Many torrents are compressed and split up into multiple files. You might find around 50 files with unknown extensions, such as .000. You need to open up the first of these with a program like 7-zip or Winrar. Then it will open the other files automatically.

There are hundreds, perhaps thousands, of other small things that you can do to make your torrent experience better. These are the basic tips that should get you downloading your first torrent.

I have been using siteuptime.com to monitor my websites for downtime. I find this service to be very useful because lately my site has been experiencing some downtime, so I might be switching hosts. With Site Uptime I can see exactly when my site goes down and comes back online. I can also configure it to send me an email when my site goes down or comes back up.

You can get a free account from Site Uptime that will test your site every 30 or 60 minutes and send you an email when it goes down and back up. For only a couple dollars a month, you can also receive detailed graphs and statistics on your site, as well as have your site checked up to every 5 minutes. With a free account you can track only one site, but with one of the paid accounts you can track more. You also get a lot of other features. I highly recommend getting a paid account because it’s cheap and has so many features.

This tool can save you a lot of money because if your website is down, you can’t make any money from it. Site Uptime will show you if this happens, and if it happens frequently you should maybe get a different host. So sign up with Site Uptime now!

42Topics.com is not just your average social media website. Usually, social media websites just allow you to vote on which story is interesting for you. But 42 Topics does a lot more than that. At 42 Topics, the stories you like and dislike are tracked and recorded. Then when new stories are submitted, the system compares them to the ones you have liked or disliked before. That way you get to see the stories which you will surely like. 42 Topics is a very sophisticated social media network. It has more features than most popular social news sites, such as creating your own topics and tagging stories you find.

An interesting fact about 42 Topics is that currently there aren’t 42 topics. However there are topics about humor, pictures, programming, sports, startups, SEO, environment, Django, India, and a topic called 42ndtopic. Since there is such a wide range of topics about different subjects, 42 Topics is a place where everyone could go to get their daily dose of news or just interesting stories.

The humor section is hilarious. I found many funny submissions there, such as this picture called The Best Deal in Vegas. The SEO section has some very interesting news regarding SEO. I found this particular article about How Much a Top Google Ranking is Worth to Your Business interesting and bringing up some very good points.

The programming topics section is one I personally will be checking often since I am a programmer. This section features topics from useful tips about programming, to programming jokes to get you through your work day. Here is an awesome topic I found that shows a CSS animated Homer. This is definitely the coolest CSS drawing I have ever found. To those of you who do not understand this one, simply put it is a drawing made of CSS code. The programming section on 42 Topics also has coding tutorials, tips, and tricks.

Another favorite section of mine on 42 Topics is the SEO section. SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization, which means designing your web pages to rank high in search engines. I have found some great tips about aspects of SEO here that will surely help me out with my own blogs and websites. I also found some interesting topics about Twitter. I have considered marketing with Twitter before, but now thanks to 42 Topics I will probably do something with it now instead of putting it off continuously.

If by now you are wondering what the 42ndtopic section is, it is like a mixup of the other various sections. 42 Topic claims this is the coolest section of them all. I can say this is fairly true, because I just found out thanks to browsing this section that the iPhone is now the most popular camera phone.

42 Topics is a very interesting website. I think it has the potential to be much better than the current top social media websites. All it needs is a bigger community so there can be more topic voting going around. So what are you waiting for? Check out 42Topics.com right now and sign up!