FOSSwire

Just a quick note to say that the second most popular web browser out there and one of the most used bits of open source on the desktop, Firefox has had version 3.0 go gold.

Unfortunately, at the time of writing Mozilla's servers are down following an attempt to win Firefox a Guinness World Record for being the software most downloaded in 24 hours. The sheer weight of traffic attempting to snag the new release and help achieve the record has brought pretty much every Mozilla site to its knees.

Still, when things do come back up, be sure to grab yourself Firefox 3.0, get your Firefox-using friends (on all platforms) to upgrade and of course help convince others to switch!

Once it's back up, you'll be able to get Firefox here.

UPDATE: I've now managed to get on the site, so the links might well work again. Or they might go back down... YMMV.

The first release candidate version of Firefox 3 is now available from Mozilla.

If you're already using the beta of Firefox 3, which many people on the latest Linux distros will, it is unlikely there will be that many functionality changes and new features in this RC release, but it is designed to bring greater stability and move closer towards the final release of Firefox 3.0.

Having said that, this new RC does have some new features that don't make an appearance in the most recent beta.

Cited are some new user interface improvements, which improve the consistency with Firefox on each platform it is available from. There are also some updates to the location bar, among many backend changes.

The RC1 release is available to download, see the announcement for download links and more information.

There are lots of sites that offer streaming audio and video services these days. A lot of these use Flash video, but some older sites use other streaming technologies, including Real, Windows Media and QuickTime to deliver the content.

Downloading these streams so you can save them for later is almost always possible. It's worth pointing out at this point that you should check as to whether you have the legal right to dump streams to your machine, but I'll leave it to you to do this responsibly.

One of the ways you can dump this type of stream to your computer is to use the media player Mplayer.

With Mplayer already installed, you simply use the -dumpstream command line option to tell it to read the stream and save it to a file (by default, called stream.dump).

$ mplayer -dumpstream streamurl

streamurl in this example is the URL of the stream, which usually begins with rtsp:// or mms://. The hardest part of actually ripping a stream in this way is discovering this URL, as sites often don't make this immediately available.

I'd recommend the Firefox extension UnPlug for this purpose, as it can often discover the stream URL for you, even if it is unable to do the whole ripping process. You can then copy and paste that URL into your mplayer -dumpstream command, and you'll get the media file.

Again, though, do this responsibly and legally. ;)