There is a distinct difference between traditional European and African cultures experience of time. While Europeans have a Western mechanical concept of time African cultures have an emotional time consciousness.

Good example are weddings. In Western societies a line gets drawn – a date is set. All organisation, preparations etc. gear up to that point.

Traditional Africans had a different approach. The wedding festival was had when the preparations have been completed whenever that may be.

The Mozilla team could have taken a lesson there!

Firefox 3 was hyped up to be launched on a specific day with tie-in marketing and event – like a commercial product. Al this in an attempt to break a Guinness record for downloads.

There lies the problem.

The focus seems to have been on delivering a product at a certain time rather than delivering it when the whole team signed off on their required tasks – including bug fixing.

Firefox is popular because it is a good browser. It was free from bloat and gave people many features and most importantly it did it so with minimum problems.

The team’s rush to get 3 out on this artificial deadline led to a “gamma version” final release. This version still has some half baked flaws which may be indicative of lot more problems under the hood.

Example flaw:

History and Cache clearing or more specifically the fact that how many time you press the button it does not actually work. This is especially a problem when you see an OLDER VERSION saved version of a page rather than the latest live version actual exists.

To change this the user has been advised to do the following.

1)Type “about:config” (without the quotation marks) into the location bar
2) Click the “I’ll be careful, I promise!” button
3) Filter “browser.urlbar.maxRichResults”
4) Double click the row and reset the value to “0″

Sorry fanboys – this is NOT user friendly or intuitive. Also this is just a work around – it just means it doesnt store the history in the first place, not fixing the fact that clear function doesn’t work properly.

If you want to compete with Microsoft then deliver a better product NOT play the marketing game like them – which is why they have exactly these issues.

The Firefox edge has been lost with 3. For me the browser wars are back on.

Personally I’ve downgraded back to version 2.