14 DAY TRIAL // 20 million downloads of Firefox 3.0 later and Mozilla is moving onward with Firefox version 3.1, 3.0.1 and 2.0.0.15. Version 3.0 of the open source browser was dropped on June 17, 2008, and skyrocketed to over 8 million downloads in the first 24 hours. By the end of week one, Firefox 3.0 accounted for more than 20 million downloads according to Asa Dotzler, Mozilla's community coordinator. And Mozilla is already hard at work on the next version of Firefox 3.0, namely build 3.0.1. Moving from 2.0 to 3.0, the former practices of Firefox version labeling were scrapped and in this regard, 3.0.1, and not 3.0.0.1 will follow the original Firefox 3.0 to the market.
"We're seven days after the launch of Firefox 3 and we've already exceeded 20 million downloads. This is pretty amazing to me. I really can't even picture 20 million people. I was trying to close my eyes and see a crowd of 20 million and I just couldn't," Dotzler stated. "Trying to picture all of the Firefox users in the world, over 180,000,000 is just insane."
Mike Beltzner, the Mozilla User Experience Lead informed that the bug triage for the Firefox 3.0.1 stability and security update has already debuted. But Mozilla is, in fact, working on no less than three versions of Firefox. On top of v3.0.1, Mozilla is also hammering away at the next release of Firefox 2.0, which is build 2.0.0.15. At this point in time, the first development milestones of Firefox 2.0.0.15 are already available to testers and the final version is planned for release on July 2.
And on top of it all, Firefox 3.1, the successor of Firefox 3.0 is already in the making. Codenamed Shiretoko, Firefox 3.1 is based on Gecko 1.9.1 and will be released by the end of 2008. As far as Firefox 3.1 is concerned, Mozilla developer David Baron already has a list of CSS features in place which will be integrated in the browser.
For the time being, Firefox 3.0 is available for download here.