Firefox 3, Free and Open Java
May 18th, 2008 by sharps
Last week I installed Fedora 9 on my laptop and so far I like what I see - the desktop and visual effects are pretty nice without being to much of a distraction. Security is pretty solid with encrypted disk and SE Linux if you need it. All in all - everything seems to hang together. I’ve mainly used Ubuntu and OS/X over the last 4 years and this is the first time I’ve tried Fedora but everything seems pretty familiar. I’ve still got to iron out a few issues related to working with Red Hat’s IT infrastructure (how ironic is that) but all in all I think F9 is a keeper.
A couple of things stand out. First - the Fedora peeps took a little bit of a risk by including Firefox 3 (beta 5) but I think it paid off - Beta 5 seems pretty solid and Firefox just keeps getting better and better. There’s no specific feature of Firefox 3 I’m excited about but there a quite a few nice little touches that make a difference - eg. the ability to open all the bookmarks in a folder - I can now open all my work related apps with one key click - nice.
The second thing of interest is the inclusion of IcedTea - this is a completely free and open version of Sun’s OpenJDK and was developed by Red Hat. I’m personally pretty excited about Red Hat’s involvement in OpenJDK - I think we’ll see Linux in general become a much more important place for the Java platform now that it’s part of the ecosystem.