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Firefox 3 is released for download

Tom Espiner ZDNet.co.uk

Published: 17 Jun 2008 18:03 BST

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.

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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.

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Why do so many (virtually all) software packages think that they are so important that they have to be started automatically every time the computer boots? What is the largest number of "speed access", "update check", "camera download" and whatever other background programs you have ever seen running? Of those, how many did you really need?