Firefox 3 officially released

 

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By Barry Collins

Posted on 17 Jun 2008 at 08:54

Firefox 3 has been officially released, with nearly 1.5 million people already pledged to download the browser.

You can read our review of Firefox 3 here.

The pledges form part of a Mozilla World Record attempt for the most downloads within a 24-hour period - although there's no existing record to break.

Oddly, given Mozilla's European focus and it's eagerness to set a landmark number of downloads, the browser's release was delayed until six in the evening, in order to give the US a chance to wake up.

The official launch comes after an exhaustive five beta tests and three release candidates, although RC3 was only required to mop up a few remaining problems with the Mac OS X version of the browser.

With Firefox 3 out of the door, work has begun on Firefox 3.1, with an Alpha release scheduled for launch as early as next month.

Planned improvements for 3.1 include tab previews and the welcome introduction of tag autocomplete, which helps prevent duplicates cropping up in Firefox 3's new bookmark tagging feature.

Tweaks to the Gecko rendering engine and support for HTML 5 video are also on the cards.

See the September issue of PC Pro for a power-user's guide to Firefox 3, on sale mid-July

Firefox 3 is available from mozilla.com/firefox.