14 DAY TRIAL // Microsoft's Internet Explorer team had nothing but love for Mozilla, especially on the day that Firefox 3.0 was unleashed. As absurd as this statement might sound, it is actually true. And the Redmond company itself offered illustrative proof of this via a memento that the IE team sent Mozilla to celebrate the launch of Firefox 3.0. Microsoft has gone all out in order to mark the release of the next iteration of the Firefox open source browser and sent Mozilla an elaborate cake, complete with a 3D logo of Internet Explorer 7.
"Congratulations on shipping!" reads the inscription on the cake which comes with "Love, from the IE team". One thing is clear, Microsoft apparently jumped the gun on both the congratulations and the love factors. The IE team should have waited for Firefox 3.0 to pass 7.5 million downloads in just the first 24 hours of availability before "rushing" to join the party. This, while Internet Explorer 7 has proven incapable of burying Firefox 2.0, and barely capable of taking down its predecessor, the evidently inferior Internet Explorer 6.
And speaking of Firefox 2.0, the launch of version 2.0 for Firefox was marked by Microsoft with the first cake sent to Mozilla. Back in October 2006, when both Internet Explorer 7 and Firefox 2.0 hit, Microsoft accounted for 81.37% of the browser market while Mozilla owned a share of 12.97%, according to data from Net Applications. In May 2008, Firefox's share is up all the way to 18.41% while Internet Explorer dropped to just 73.75%. A single cake cost Microsoft no less than 7.6% of the browser market in almost two years. It's not a simple equation for the Redmond company, but Firefox 3.0 will further hurt its dominance over the browser market. Internet Explorer 8, the best thing that Microsoft will have to throw against Firefox 3.0, is still two months away from the Beta 2 stage, with the final availability date was not even set yet. Meanwhile Mozilla's web servers have been dealing with heavy, over 15GB, traffic and some 14,000 simultaneous downloads of Firefox 3.0 per second when the interest for the browser hit the peak.
Firefox 3.0 Final for Windows is available for download here. Firefox 3.0 Final for Linux is available for download here. Firefox 3.0 Final for Mac OS X is available for download here.