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Mozilla has officially made history with a new Guinness world record for the largest number of software downloads in a 24-hour period. The final record breaking 8,002,530 downloads for Firefox 3.0 took place in June with parties in over 25 countries. "The enthusiasm and creativity of Firefox fans was key to making this happen" said Marketing head Paul Kim. Gareth Deaves of Guinness World Records called it "an extremely impressive accomplishment".
The official figure was confirmed after logs from download servers were audited and checked to ensure duplicate and unfinished downloads were not counted. Mr Kim told the BBC: "The notion of going for a world record, as gooky and nutty as it may have sounded, was a really sticky idea. "It was an idea that translated really well across national borders and to all different kinds of people around the world."

View: Full Article @ BBC News

Set a Guinness World Record Enjoy a Better Web
Sounds like a good deal, right? All you have to do is get Firefox 3 during Download Day to help set the record for most software downloads in 24 hours - it’s that easy. We’re not asking you to swallow a sword or to balance 30 spoons on your face, although that would be kind of awesome.

Link: Official Download Day Page
View: Time Zones of the official download time

Mozilla has finally set a date for the official launch of Firefox 3 - which open sourcers hope will set a world record for most ever downloads in a day.

Firefox 3.0 will be ready for download from next Tuesday - 17 June. But the big day, dubbed Download Day, could be delayed if a serious bug is uncovered at the last minute. The browser claims to be quicker, more stable and to make it easier to set bookmarks.

Mozilla hopes to get at least 1.6 million downloads within 24 hours and set a new Guinness world record. It hopes Firefox fanboys and girls will organise parties and get people to sign pledges to download the browser. Mozilla claims to have received over 40,000 pledges from the UK and more than 180,000 from the US.

Release Candidates of the software have been tested over the last few weeks.

Firefox accounts for some 20 to 30 per cent of browser market share, depending on whose figures you believe. It is the most popular of the alternative browsers - those that are not pre-installed on PCs.

This second Firefox 3 Release Candidate is a preview release of Mozilla’s next generation Firefox browser and is being made available for testing purposes only.
Firefox 3 is based on the Gecko 1.9 Web rendering platform, which has been under development for the past 34 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.

View: Mozilla Firefox 3 RC2 Main Page
View: Mozilla Firefox 3 RC2 Release Notes

Downloads (via official distributed mirrors):
Mozilla Firefox 3 RC2 English Windows | 7.15 MB
Mozilla Firefox 3 RC2 English Mac OS X | 17.17 MB
Mozilla Firefox 3 RC2 English Linux | 8.66 MB

Set a Guinness World Record, enjoy a better web. It’s the goal of the Spread Firefox group when Firefox 3 goes final this summer.
“Sounds like a good deal, right? All you have to do is get Firefox 3 during Download Day to help set the record for most software downloads in 24 hours - it’s that easy. We’re not asking you to swallow a sword or to balance 30 spoons on your face, although that would be kind of awesome,” the site says.
This will take approximately a week after the attempt date to know if the record was broken. Judges from Spread Firefox and Guinness World Records will need to review download logs and validate the record attempt. This is the first record attempt of its kind so there is no set number to beat, although the group looks to the number of Firefox 2 downloads on its launch day, which was 1.6 million. 5 million seems to be their target for Firefox 3.
One of the biggest hurdles faced is the fact that a “download” is the transmission of the entire, fully functioning Firefox 3 — not just an update.
The official release date for Firefox 3 has not been announced yet, however, Spread Firefox claims to be posting on their site “soon.”

View: Download Day 2008

Mozilla Corp. Thursday confirmed that it will release the final beta of Firefox 3.0 shortly, and that it expects to deliver the finished browser to users in June. Firefox 3.0 Beta 5 has been code-frozen, said Mike Schroepfer, Mozilla’s vice president of engineering, and is working its way toward release. “That will be the last beta for Firefox 3.0,” he said. Once Beta 5 is out of the way, developers will move to the Release Candidate (RC) stage.
Release Candidate 1 (RC1) should be ready sometime in early May, said Schroepfer, assuming Mozilla meets its current schedule. “The release candidates will move a little slower than beta,” he continued, noting that the company must make allowances for public feedback.

Source: PcWorld

A new version of Mozilla’s popular Firefox Web browser is ready for download with improved security and memory use as the tiny company takes a stab at Microsoft Corp’s dominant Internet Explorer.
The program’s creators told Reuters on Thursday that the privately-held company’s trial version of Firefox 3 browser is ready for the masses to use after months of development. Until now, the company has discouraged average Internet users from moving on from Firefox 2, which was launched in October 2006.
“In many ways it (Firefox 3) is much more stable than anything else out there,” Mozilla Corp Vice President of Engineering Mike Schroepfer said in an interview. Key rivals to Firefox are market leader Microsoft’s Internet Explorer and Apple Inc’s Safari browser.

News Source: Reuters

by Michael Muchmore

A week after the first Internet Explorer 8 beta, the Mozilla Foundation tried to steal some of Redmond’s thunder with its own one-upping fourth beta release of the next-generation Firefox 3 browser.

The new beta sports an improved download manager; full-page zoom; better integration with Vista, Mac OS, and Linux; improved location bar auto-completion; and better performance and memory usage.

On the surface, the new beta Firefox 3 Beta 4 doesn’t look much different than Beta 3, but Mozilla states that it incorporates more than 900 enhancements from the previous version. Chief among these are performance and memory usage improvements, and in PC Magazine’s initial testing of the beta, we experienced noticeably snappier browsing and program loading. We did notice, however, memory usage growing while remaining on a single web page—PCMag.com—which ballooned from 50 Mbytes to the mid 60s over the course of a minute. Browser startup time was vastly improved, taking just 2 seconds to load, compared with the first beta’s 25 seconds.

The new download manager always shows you how much time is remaining for your download to complete. It also features a search box so that you can find a previous download based on the web site where you found the software. A pause button is handy if you need your connection bandwidth for other tasks in the middle of a large download.

Icons, toolbars, and menu styles for the Windows Vista, Mac OS X, and Linux versions of Firefox 3 are now tailored to look like the native interface elements in those OSes. For the Mac Firefox now uses OS X widgets and spell-checker in web forms and supports Growl notifications.

One of Firefox 3’s most useful new features—location bar autocomplete—has gotten even better. When you start to type a web address in the “location bar” (elsewhere known as the “address bar”) Firefox uses a smarter algorithm and larger display to help you get to a site you’ve previously visited. According to Mozilla sources: “Results are returned according to their frequency (a combination of frequency and recency of visits to that page) ensuring that you’re seeing the most relevant matches. An adaptive learning algorithm further tunes the results to your patterns!”

The new beta browser version is available in 40 languages for Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux. You can obtain it from Mozilla’s Firefox download site. Keep in mind that the beta is intended for testing, development, and bug reporting, so it’s not recommended for use as your primary browser. That said, this version feels far more fully baked, speedy, and stable than the earlier betas.

The Firefox development team has determined that they will need to produce a fifth beta of Firefox 3 after this, because of the number of blocker bugs remaining in the current code. The internal deadline for beta 5 is March 18 and general release will follow that by two weeks, if it follows the pattern of previous releases.

Mozilla is in informal talks with mobile operators about its mobile Firefox project, which the organization hopes will shake up the market as much as the introduction of the desktop browser did in 2004. “Mozilla’s mission is to break open a closed market,” said Mike Schroepfer, Mozilla’s vice president of engineering, during a visit to London earlier this week. But “it won’t happen overnight.”
The impact, however, will be felt before year’s end. By then, Mozilla is aiming to release a mobile browser for two operating systems: embedded Linux and Microsoft’s Windows Mobile. At this point, operators and carriers “want to know how much it will cost,” Schroepfer said. That’s an easy answer: mobile Firefox will be free, Schroepfer said.

View: The full story @ InfoWorld

Firefox just reached 500,000,000 downloads, an absolutely phenomenal milestone for Firefox. It is sort of hard to imagine what that number means. For some perspective, half a billion is roughly the audience size of 10,000 Roman Colosseums combined. It would be the weight, in kilograms, of 8,500 Boeing 747 airplanes. In dollars, for $500 million you and 15 of your friends can fly to the International Space Station. Alternately, you can effect change and invite those 15 friends to play a game and feed 25,000 people. With your help we can break another milestone with FreeRice.com by working together to donate 500,000,000 grains of rice to people in need. Help us celebrate by helping feed the hungry while picking up some new vocabulary, too!