Firefox 3 got released today. And with the release is an attempt to set a new world record for the most downloaded software in 24 hours. So if you are a Firefox fanboy, help contribute to the world record by downloading Firefox 3 here.
South Africans have until 17:00 hours today to complete their downloads for it to count toward the world record.
Mozilla has issued the first official release candidate of Firefox 3, the next major version of the popular open source web browser. This Firefox 3 Release Candidate is a preview release of Mozilla’s next generation Firefox browser and is being made available for testing purposes only.
One of the most impressive features in Firefox 3 is the new Places system, a massive overhaul of the browser’s bookmark and history functionality that is built on SQLite and provides noticeable improvements to performance and data integrity. The Places system has facilitated a number of very compelling user interface enhancements, like the new combined history and bookmarks organizer and an impressively intelligent new autocompletion implementation for the browser address bar.
Firefox 3 is based on the Gecko 1.9 Web rendering platform, which has been under development for the past 33 months. Building on the previous release, Gecko 1.9 has more than 14,000 updates including some major re-architecting to provide improved performance, stability, rendering correctness, and code simplification and sustainability. Firefox 3 has been built on top of this new platform resulting in a more secure, easier to use, more personal product with a lot more under the hood to offer website and Firefox add-on developers.
Performance and memory efficiency were high priorities for Firefox 3. Firefox 3 now uses less memory than Safari and Opera in some benchmarks.
Mozilla provides Firefox 3 for Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X in a variety of languages. You can get the latest version of Firefox 3 here.
I installed it and did not have any problem to date, so if you are a Firefox junkie like I am or even a plugin developer I would suggest you install this RC and start testing or making sure your plugins is compatible with Firefox 3 before the final release.
