A historical day for Firefox users, a great opportunity for Mozilla to set a Guinness world record

Jun 17, 2008 08:09 GMT  ·  By

Although Mozilla says it's "not quite ready yet", the final version of your favorite web browser, Mozilla Firefox 3 is here! Our eagle-eyed folks nabbed it the instant it was available. So, let the download party for the Guinness world record begin!

"We're just as excited as you are for our upcoming release, but we're still putting the finishing touches on Firefox 3: preparing the new mozilla.com website, getting our servers ready for downloads, and doing our final pre-launch checks. You can follow our progress if you'd like", Mozilla says. "The files in this directory are - for now - only meant to be used by our testers. Downloading them directly can harm our ability to distribute Firefox efficiently, and will also not be counted as part of our attempt to set a Guiness World Record for the most software downloads in a day."

Last week, the Mozilla team found it necessary to release a workaround for a bug introduced in Apple's latest maintenance and security update, Mac OS X 10.5.3, which was released just three weeks ago. The bug caused systems to hang or crash at start-up or shutdown.

From the Welcome page of Firefox 3.0 (RC3):

For Everyone

- Just start typing in the Location Bar to search your bookmarks and history. It adapts and learns as you use it. - Pause and resume your downloads, and search through your download history by file or website name using the new Download Manager. - Find out who you're talking to by clicking on the website icon. - Experience the fastest Firefox ever - twice to three times as fast on today's complex web applications like Google Mail or Zoho Office.

For Web Developers

- Find out how to update your web application to take advantage of the power of Firefox 3. - Try out the improved CSS support in Firefox 3. - Test your site with the new DOM improvements, including support for extensions to the DOM added by other browsers. - Add power to your web applications with JavaScript 1.8, included in Firefox 3.

For Extension Developers

- Get your add-on ready for Firefox 3 so that you're not left behind. - Use the new FUEL library to simplify many of your most common tasks. - Experiment with the new, more powerful, easier to use Places API. - Check out all the Improvements to XUL in Firefox 3. - Be sure to look at all the details in our documentation for extension developers.

According to Mozzila, Firefox 3 is based on the Gecko 1.9 Web rendering platform, which has been under development for the past 34 months. Gecko 1.9 builds on the previous release adding more than 15,000 updates, including some "major re-architecting" for 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.

You can download Mozilla Firefox 3 for Mac HERE.

Requirements call for a Mac with an Intel x86 or PowerPC G3, G4, or G5 processor. You will need to run Mac OS X 10.4 or later, sport 128 MB RAM (Recommended: 256 MB RAM or greater) and 200 MB of hard drive space.