dadams.co.uk

The nice people at Mozilla want to set a Guinness World Record for the most software downloads in 24 hours and are using the launch of Firefox 3 in a bid to achieve it. So this coming Tuesday, the 17th of June, is officially Download Day 2008.

I’ve already blogged about Firefox 3 here so I don’t need to do it again. Let’s assume that if you’re already a Firefox user you’re going to want the new version. At the Spread Firefox web site you can pledge to download version 3 on Tuesday and then see how the pledges are totting up worldwide. At the moment there are 52,955 pledges from the UK, but we’re trailing France, Italy and Germany (come on people, nothing like a bit of healthy competition to spur on us Brits). Poland is way ahead in Europe with 89,313 pledges, but of course the US of A is the worldwide leader with 215,355.

Mozilla need 1.6 downloads to set the record, currently the total pledges stand at just under 1.3 million. So what are you waiting for? If you do pledge, remember to actually do the download.

I’ve been trying out betas of Firefox 3 for a while, but yesterday I noted that Release Candidate 1 was available. That’s near-enough the final version, so it’s now installed and acting as my main browser.

Mozilla tells us that this new version provides more robust security, improved password management, better bookmark management, and improved reliability and performance. Personally I would highlight the following features:

• An address bar which not only fills in URL information but also finds words in web page titles that you’ve recently accessed - very useful if you can’t remember the URL but can remember the subject of the page
• Quick access to most-recently and most-frequently-used bookmarks
• Quick bookmarking and tagging - just click the star in the address bar

A couple of niggles though - the first will be sorted out in time… very few of my favourite plug-ins work at the moment, but I’d expect them all to support Firefox 3 very shortly. My favourite RSS reader NewsFox works so it’s no big deal.

The second is the new download manager. While it boasts some nice new features such as resumable downloads, the user interface is horrible - it looks like shareware and is a step backwards. However, this is a small gripe, and whether you go for RC1 or wait until the final 3.0 release I’d definately recommend Firefox 3 (especially if Internet Explorer is still your browser of choice).