Firefox 3 is released

Firefox 3 is now available to download and the Mozilla Foundation are aiming to set a Guinness World Record for the amount of downloads in 24 hours.

At the time of writing this, it is still officially Download Day 2008 and they are well on their way to setting a very big download total. This is despite the download servers being overwhelmed at the beginning of the day and actually crashing with too many requests.

You would think that they would have prepared for this, but perhaps this is a sign of Firefox's increasing popularity which has even caught its creators by surprise. The latest version of their browser is certainly going to nibble further into Microsoft's majority share of browser use.

Firefox 3 has been hailed as being the fastest and most secure browser now available. Speed tests certainly show that it loads pages faster than its rivals and is a big improvement over Firefox 2. Memory bugs have also been fixed so the latest version is a far lighter load on your system.

Installing Firefox 3 is easy and all your settings and bookmarks are carried over if you have its predecessor installed already. In terms of looks, it is very similar to Firefox 2 but with some noticeable changes to the back and forward buttons and the address bar.

The new address bar or "Awesome Bar" as its makers refer to it, is one of the most noticeable improvements to the browser. It uses past behaviour to help determine what webpage you want to visit, so by typing in "clik" I was offered a number of suitable options, with the CLiK Development website being top.

This tool bypasses the middle step of search engine results and greatly reduces the amount of keystrokes required to navigate to a webpage, so it will certainly change browsing habits.

As a web developer, the emergence of a new browser that supports the latest standards is always welcomed, but there is the added headache that this is yet another browser added to the list for testing new websites. Due to the fact that many internet users still use old and often antique versions of web browsers this is always going to be an issue.