Firefox aiming for a Guinness World Record today

Buy an ad on DigitalJournal.com

Already more than a million users worldwide have pledged to download the current version of Firefox 3.

A few months ago, Mozilla launched a beta version of Firefox 3 and after 1000s of updates it is fully launching it to the public today.

I have been using it for the past few months and have to say it shows significant improvements over Firefox 2. It is the fastest browser on the market and occupies less memory than previous versions and IE browsers.

Currently Firefox has 15 per cent of the browser market share, Internet Explorer is still leading but mostly because it comes as a default browser on computers. Once someone gets the chance to use Firefox, I would bet they will find it better than IE and other browsers.

WEB BROWSER STATS

Internet Explorer - 83.27%
Firefox - 13.76%
Apple Safari - 2.18%
Opera - 0.55%
Netscape - 0.14%
Source: OneStat

To become a part of history, you can pledge to download Firefox 3 at the special site here. The site provides a map where users are located and you can see quite a distribution across the world.

Paul Kim, head of marketing at Mozilla told BBC:

"It's a global effort to make history…There is actually no record for the greatest amount of software downloaded in one day, so for 24 hours from the moment we push the bits live, that's when the countdown starts."

Kim has no specific target numbers, but they hope to get five million downloads if possible.

When Firefox 2.0 was launched, Mozilla registered 1.6 million downloads on the first day. Nearly 1.4 million have pledged to download it today. You can see the launch time for each region in the world in the picture below:

Labnol.org Firefox Launch Time Across The World image:41004:0::0

There are tons of new features in Firefox 3 but the most important thing is protection against Phishing attacks (it will warn you if you visit malicious sites), a “Smart Location Bar” (based on your visiting habits will guess the site you want to visit even before you fully type out the Web address), great set of Firefox extensions (Google Toolbar, HyperWords, Del.icio.us and more), and tons of other features.

Firefox 3 works on all platforms: Windows, Mac OS and Linux. Become a part of history and download Firefox 3 today from here.

UPDATE: Here is the download link for the new Firefox 3.