As expected, the latest version of Mozilla's Firefox web browser, Firefox 3, was made available for download on Tuesday.
After nearly three years in development, last Wednesday Mozilla announced that Firefox 3 was ready for release. During Firefox 3's development, memory-usage improvement has been a consistent theme.
Firefox's third release candidate was released on Wednesday last week, and contained a fix for loading issues with Mac OS X. The final release is identical to RC3, said the organisation.
Mozilla is hoping to set a Guinness World Record for the most number of downloads of an application in a day, on the release of the browser.
There is currently no official Guinness World Record for the total number of downloads of an application in a day. During the first 24 hours of Firefox 3's release, Mozilla is aiming for over 1.6 million downloads and hoping for five million.
Mozilla has encouraged its community of over 175 million users to sign up on the spreadfirefox.com marketing site to receive Firefox 3 on Tuesday, to host download parties, and to put Firefox badges on websites and blogs. According to Mozilla, over 60,000 people in the UK have pledged to download Firefox 3 on its release date.
Update: Firefox 3 was made available for download an hour later than expected due to server issues. The release was slated for 6pm BST, but was actually made available at 7pm BST. A combination of migration difficulties and volume of demand caused a server outage for the first hour.
ZDNet.co.uk's Andrew Donoghue contributed to this report.
Talkback
It's not easy to locate the download site which hasn't been circulated in the run up to the record attempt, or referenced on Spreadfirefox.com.
I used FileHippo.com, so don't know if I will be counted. I already had the latest RC installed which is, apparently, the same.
The link is www.getfirefox.com. I got it from Groklaw. It's very busy though.
I observed some issues with FF 3 which may annoy you.But it is worth to consider as "competitor to IE 8"
FireFox 3 : The Competitor of IE 8: Usability and some other issues
http://techfreakindia.blogspot.com/
They should provide an option to switch off that annoying address bar function. I had to go into about:config to disable it, how silly is that?
They get more like Microsoft with every release, you WILL browse the way WE think you should...
I registered with Firefox to be informed so that I could add the downloads I need on several different home PCs on download day.
I was online at around 4am on the 17th and when I tried using 'Help' and 'Check For Updates' I was told that there were no updates at all. I got the same message on each machine. If Firefox were aiming at a World record for the 17th, then they should have had it ready to download as soon as Australia and Asia reached midnight and then it should have been available across Russia and Europe in all our time zones after midnight - and of course, onwards for North America and finally the Pacific. It would have been a proper 24 hour period across the globe.
When I tried in the afternoon and evening to get a download direct from Firefox, I was advised that there was an RU failure and that I could update manually. The update then offered was Firefox 2, which I had already got. So, it was impossible all day to obtain the new version and they failed to achieve their objective, because even to those users who had registered with them, it was impossible to obtain the update. Today, all my PCs advise me that my version of Firefox is up to date and that there are no updates. It would appear that maye this hasn't been the launch that they had hoped for.
As long as the new product is good, then no-one will worry about the deadline at all. The launch date was made 'a big thing' by Firefox, but they were unable to sustain the demand for it. I daresay that I could have downloaded Firefox 3 from yourselves, Zdnnet yesterday or from one of the PC magazine websites such as Computeractive, but would that have been included in their own 'countdown' of uploads??
So, I await until Firefox officially do tell me that version 3 can be downloaded. Sadly, they could not sustain demand though and they did not make it available either, even in the small hours.
"Please DO NOT “check for updates” from within Firefox 2 as we are not yet offering it as an update and this does not count toward the record."
http://developer.mozilla.org/devnews/index.php/2008/06/17/how-to-get-firefox-3/
"Mozilla will only count downloads that are fully and completely transmitted, not partial or complete updates."
http://www.spreadfirefox.com/en-US/worldrecord/faq
If you're one of the millions who have downloaded the update, and have had a chance to play with it, why not tell everyone how you rate it? You opinion will appear alongside our editors' rating on our review of the browser. Just go <a href="http://reviews.zdnet.co.uk/software/productivity/0,1000001828,39436015,00.htm">here</a> and start typing.
So if there's no previously recorded record in the guiness book of records, doesn't that mean any data you supply would become the record? In which case Firefox 3 is guaranteed the record whether they got 5million or 50,000 downloads.
I personally will download it when things have calmed down a bit!
... as it's crashed every time I've tried to run the programme since I downloaded it about eight hours ago. Anybody else having a problem accessing the UK site, or is it just me?
I managed to get one of the 7 million downloads on the first day, mostly just to say I did it, in any case FireFox 3 in some sort of Beta or Release Candidate has been on my Windows CPUs here at home and at work for months.
The range of CPUs I've been running it on vary from a Pentium 4 @ 2.4 Ghz (here at home) to a Core 2 Duo 2.8 Ghz workstation (at work). I've also been running it on Windows Server 2008 RC1(and it doesn't seem to mind!). I haven't bothered to look at RAM usage or actually measure startup speed other than noting that it's slower than IE7 (but we all know why, since IE7 is “embedded” in the OS) but a lot faster than FireFox 2.0.14. I suspect that I missed an update on the release candidate string because I see marked improvements in the public release 3.0 from the previous release candidate I was running.
The features I especially like include the ability to set the Zoom for each website I visit on a regular basis. One of them being this site, of course! Yes I'm wearing my glasses but at the end of a 10 to 12 hour day staring at the screens at work, its nearly impossible to read the mouse-type on a lot of web pages especially those pushing news and opinions. Bloggers also tend to like to write big missives in small type.
I also like the “awesome bar” especially since I have a tendency to jump back and forth on the same sites.
I didn't have any problems with the Add-ons and extensions probably because I had them on both the 2.0.14 install and the Beta3 installs. Some of them are disabled because of versioning issues but I suspect that within a week or two they'll be back.
On rendering pages FireFox 3.0 smokes IE7! I have a test page that has URLs for all the pictures on the page scattered on 5 drives. 2 jpegs, 1 GIF, a TIFF and a BMP all with 24 bit color. It also has an Excel table that has been turned into HTML. IE7 takes about 45 seconds to render the page. FireFox 2 takes about 50 secs. FireFox 3 takes 25 seconds. Its not the same as using pictures scattered on separate websites BUT the disk drive access time is consistent each time. Each time I do 3 trials and I flush the cache each time so it varies with 2 maybe 3 seconds but its reasonably consistent.
Silverlight (Microsoft's attempt at a Web platform) does install but does not run video as a plug-in to FireFox 3. I did try it with version 2 of FireFox and it worked. A number of other pages on the Microsoft websites do not render properly under FireFox3 and typically they are asp pages for the most part. Windows Media Player plug-in works well under FireFox3.
Overall so far no problems. Its faster and more nimble than IE7. Its already my favorite and I'm using it now to send the review to the site.
I would love to know how to set the zoom level for different sites, please explain.
Basically all you have to do is press the control Key and while pressing it, press the + (plus sign ) key. That will Zoom in or make everything bigger. Press the control key and while pressing it, press the - (minus key) to zoom out or make everything smaller. The trick if there is one is to press the Control (Ctrl) key first.
BTW, I discovered (I didn't read the release notes) at least for myself that MS Office Plug-Ins work for FireFox 3! That includes Visio 2000 and 2002. Wow! If you don't have the MS Office suite installed but you just have the viewers installed it STILL works! On those computers using OpenOffice2 it will work those as plug-ins also. Max Way-out Cool!
Also it will start Windows Media Player if that's the MOV or WMA designated player.
I already knew about the [crtl] key shortcut, I thought you found a way to save the magnified settings for each web site. Oh well... maybe in the next release of Firefox.
FireFox 3 AUTOMATICALLY saves the Zoomed setting you set on each website so that when you go back to that site it will play the site back at the Zoom setting you previously viewed it at. Each website gets saved in its own zoom setting. If you leave a site and go to another, the zoom stays where you had it UNLESS the website has already been visited and had a non-default zoom setting made on it.
I hope that makes sense.