Firefox 3 - The best yet!

Update: Firefox does it! A Guinness record for most software downloaded in 24 hours! A stunning 8,002,530 downloads, verified by Guinness Book of Records over 3 weeks! Check here for more details.

Hello readers,

This is a quick post on Mozilla Firefox's latest release. To refresh Fx (or FF) users' memory and educate the ignorant IE users, that there is a better browser around; better than even Fx2!

Firefox 3, on 17th July 2008, comes with a plethora of features, many of which are simply merging Fx2 add-ons into the browser. We'll come to that later.

There was a lot of hype surrounding the release; having used it since beta 3, I thought it quite deserves it. They are even trying to set a Guinness World Record for the most software downloaded in 24 Hrs! Going by the stats, I think they can easily create a world record. w00t!!

You can follow the count right here. I urge you to take part! You even get a certificate! Here is mine. Remember though, this is open till 2100 hrs IST only. After which of course, you will be able to download and use Fx3 but not contribute to the world record. Sad, but quite fair. My bad for not blogging this before! However, looking at the world wide stats, I feel let down that there has not been enough downloads from India. For instance, Iran and Australia have fewer Internet users than us. Yet, there have been more downloads in these countries. Although, there are a few surprising entries into this world record.

• Samoa - 6
  
• Tonga - 6
  
• The Gambia - 16
• Somalia - 7 :P
• Mauritius - 530 (I guess most of them were tourists on their laptops. hehe)
• The Chad and Western Sahara Liberia - 1 each (a friend Vishal suggested it was perhaps the President :D)
  

Coming to the features, here are some which I found absolutely cool!

• one click bookmarking! Yes, that easy!
• search bookmarks/history/RSS feeds simultaneously
• search with keyword (type anything related to the site, part of the URL, title, keywords added to bookmarks etc and get relevant results)
• multi-select. God, I've wanted this since my first computer!
• smart bookmarks
• a list of 'most visited' sites, automatically generated
• a new about:mozilla page :D
• true fullscreen exprience
• anti phishing and anti-malware
• parental control
• read here for more features
• they claim to have made more than 15,000 improvements!
  

I really did this in a hurry and didn't have time to show you enough screen grabs. I'd love to though. Still, its best you go download it yourself and try it out! Good luck, and rediscover the web, again!


Note: At 1639 hrs IST, the total downloads was at 5,910,353.


Thanks,
~LVS