UPDATED: Mozilla’s sites are being hammered, use this direct link to download. And Furbism has some optimized builds up already! No, I do not and will not provide links to Windows optimized builds (don’t know or care if they exist). Added mini review.
UPDATED: Firefox 3 has surpassed Internet Explorer 3.0’s download record of 1.5 million over 24 hours in august of 1996! 1.9 million already and the day is still young! Follow the numbers here.
UPDATED: Techcrunch reports Firefox 3.0 was downloaded 8.3 million times in it’s first twenty four hours.
According to Mozilla Foundation CEO John Lilly, that gives Firefox 3 a four percent market share of browsers worldwide straight out of the gate. Mozilla’s servers sent out 83 terabytes of data during that time, and at the peak there were 17,000 downloads per second (with an average of 4,000 per second).
Ok, I’ll spare you hype. Suffice it to say that manana, the 17th of June 2008 is the release date of the freeware Open Source webrowser, Firefox 3.0. And the Mozilla foundation, developers of Firefox would like you to help set a world record for software by getting your free copy. If you’re on Linux, Mac OS X, or even Windows you should get it. For Windows users it provides a faster, more secure and more extensible browser, for the other operating systems it gives you the extensibility and choice-you might find you like it better then your default system browser. Get Firefox here.
I realize not everyone is as browser nerdy as me. I usually have 5+ browsers installed: Opera, Safari, Firefox, Camino, Webkit nightly builds and Firefox nightly builds. But you should have one browser set up as default with cookies turned off, and another one with cookies on (no third party) that you only use for your secure browsing (like banking, bloging, or any website with your billing info).
For the nerdly like me who use the links in my sidebar for browsers optimized for specific processors, you might want to wait a few days for the optimizers to recompile. Optimized browsers tend to be faster and less memory intensive, so us laptop lovers can have more tabs open. And yes, this post was written in Firefox 3.0 release candidate 3, PowerPC 7450 optimized which runs best on my loaner laptop.
MINI REVIEW. New look, blends better with whatever OS your running, can now search your bookmarks (and history) through the addressbar, smaller memory footprint, no more memory leaks, new privacy and security features, better and more standards complient rendering, Faster!
