Mozilla Firefox 3 downloads at 6 or 14 million

None of us can deny how popular the new Firefox 3 download has been, and if you head over to Mozilla they have a Firefox 3 downloads worldwide page. This map allows you to track how many downloads there are in total, as well as for each country. At the moment Firefox say that almost 6 million have downloaded the browser, but when you head over to Download.com their reports are a little conflicting. They are showing that in total there have been almost 14 million downloads and that does not include Mac downloads.

So which site is giving us the correct figures, many would say Download.com and that Firfox are behind. But I would have thought that Mozilla Firefox would have the correct figures, as they are trying for a world downloads record. We reported yesterday that Mozilla were going for a download for world record attempt with their Firefox 3 browser, however there is no such record with The Guinness World Records. Firefox would still like this record, as a result they have put in a petition to put most download software in 24 hours in to The Guinness World Records.

Firefox had asked people yesterday to try and help break the world record for the most software downloads in 24 hours, it is an easy thing that people had to do, and I am pleased to say I was one of them.

Firefox 3 has some great new features, these include, one-click bookmarking, smart location bar as well as lightning fast performance. Security has also been improved with phishing and malware protection. Other features include built-in spell checking, session restore and full zoom. All of these make Firefox 3 faster and more reliable.

Download Mozilla Firefox 3, release date is today: where will this leave Linux users?

Mozilla has finally announced that today is the day for downloading the much anticipated Firefox 3, oh yes June 17th 2008 is a good day for all those that want the new Firefox 3 download. Open source software enthusiasts and developers are planning major parties all over the world to celebrate this brilliant occasion.

Mozilla are trying to get into Guinness World Records, the Firefox team are hoping to set the record for the most software downloads in 24 hours and the total number of unique downloads that take place on release day will be submitted for potential inclusion in the Guinness World Records, it has been said that over one million users have already signed up to pledge their support. So what is the status of Firefox 3 add-on compatibility? Many readers have asked this question, they have also asked that they will not be ready to upgrade their best add-on until the add-ons are supported. Alex Polvi, Mozilla’s Product Manager has written a brief overview that explains the current status of the most popular add-ons. Some of my favorites, like Greasemonkey, Firebug, and Stylish are now all compatible with Firefox 3. Unfortunately, Google Browser Sync is being discontinued and will no longer be supported. Google recommends that users adopt Mozilla Weave or Foxmarks.

Mozilla’s add-on team has been hard at work getting a brand new version of the add-on web site ready in time for the release. The new site now includes a theme browser that displays thumbnails and a new advanced search system, as well as numerous improvements for developers. There are already plans in the works for Firefox 3.1 which has been given the codename of “Shiretoko” (Bless what a nice name), obviously this is in its early stages of development but the schedule indicates that alpha releases could be available as early as July, Prominent user interface features planned for the 3.1 release include tab previews and tag auto-completion. Developers also plan to add several new features to Firefox’s Gecko rendering engine such as the HTML 5 video element and CSS text shadows.

Now we want to know “where will this leave Linux users? Many people know that most users of Linux distributions do not get their Firefox browser directly from Mozilla. Instead, they get Firefox packages through their Linux distributions. The Linux version of Firefox which are sometimes customized by the distribution’s creator, also do not have the “Check for Updates” button enabled in the browser — while the button is enabled on Windows editions. The issue most recently came to the forefront after both Red Hat Fedora and Ubuntu shipped their recent Linux versions with Firefox 3 Beta 5. When the browser’s later Release Candidates 1 (RC1) and Release Candidate 2 (RC2) versions came out, users of the both popular distributions did not immediately get update notifications like their Windows counterparts.

So as said where will this leave Linux users and will they get Firefox at the same time as Windows users?

Visit the Mozilla Firefox 3 download page here