Firefox 3.0 Download Day
Firefox 3.0 was released today, and as part of a gimmick to spread the word, the people over at Mozilla are trying to set the Guiness Book world record for the most number of downloads of a piece of software in a single day. The goal was, I believe, 1.6 million, and already they are up to over 7 million and still counting with a download rate of about 6000 downloads per minute (yikes!) The download day doesn't end until 2:16 pm Eastern Time, so you've still got a chance to download this great web browser and push that number up over the 10 million mark.
Yes, I know this is a bit of a ridiculous record to be setting, even by the Guiness Book's pathetically poor standards, but let me tell you why you should participate anyways: Firefox 3.0 is some seriously badass software! I've been running the Beta version of it for about 2 months now and even the beta is way more stable than Firefox 2. In addition to that, it's fast! I'm not talking just a few ticks faster than Firefox 2 or IE6, I mean noticably very very fast. Aside from that, it also comes with a brilliant new feature apropriately called the "Awesome Bar." What Firefox has done is replace the history in your web browser with a small database, called SQLite. Now, in addition to keeping track of the addresses of all the websites you have visited, it also stores information like the title of the web site, the websites icon, and so on. The advantage of this is that you can now use your navigation bar like a Google search of all the websites you've visited. Say you remember reading a web page about some 7 foot tall papier mache aligator but you don't remember how you found it and can't remember the web address. No worries, all you do is type "aligator papier mache" into the navigation bar and firefox gleens through all the websites you've visited and pulls up the one you're looking for, awesome! Finally, the best reason to download Firefox 3.0 is that it does a better, more accurate job of rendering websites according to how they're supposed to look. It's the first Firefox release to pass the Acid2 test, and it has a whole slew of other backend changes that make browsing the web easier, and bug free. In short, stop reading this crap and head on over to Mozilla's webpage to download Firefox 3.0!