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At the time of writing this article, the Firefox 3.0 download counter was 5,713,774 out of which India contributed about 52,772. The highest number of downloads is coming from the United States, followed by Germany and Spain.

Download Firefox 3.0 Now.

In anticipation of this long-awaited event, the folks in the Mozilla community have been writing extensively about the new and improved features you’ll see in the browser. The new features cover the full range from huge and game-changing to ones so subtle you may not notice them until you realize that using Firefox is just somehow easier and better. The range of improved features is similar — whole back-end systems have been rebuilt from scratch, while other features have been tweaked slightly or redesigned in small ways. Overall the result is the fastest, safest, slimmest, and easiest to use version of Firefox yet.

• Add-on manager
• Bookmarks
• Cascading Style Sheets (CSS)
• Color profile support
• Download manager
• Font and text rendering
• Full page zoom
• History
• HTML Canvas
• Location bar UTF-8 support
• Malware protection
• Microformats API
• Offline web application support
• Password manager
• Performance improvements
• Phishing protection
• Plugins
• Site Identification button
• Smart Location Bar
• Tabs
• Themes
• Video and audio feeds
• Vista parental controls support
• Web application protocol handlers
• Conclusion

The guide is extensive and complete with images/screenshots. Visit the Field Guide to Firefox 3.

Firefox 3 will be released simultaneously for Windows and the Mac’s OS X operating system, as well as for Linux. While each of the three editions will have the visual style of the operating system on which it runs, all three will have the same features.

Firefox 3 has a number of new and improved features. If you type any word or phrase into its address bar, the browser instantly searches your history and bookmarks for a possible match, to save you from typing or combing through your bookmark list.

Some of the many other prominent features are;

• One-click site info: Click the site favicon in the location bar to see who owns the site and to check if your connection is protected from eavesdropping. Identity verification is prominently displayed and easier to understand. When a site uses Extended Validation (EV) SSL certificates, the site favicon button will turn green and show the name of the company you’re connected to.
• New SSL error pages: clearer and stricter error pages are used when Firefox encounters an invalid SSL certificate.
• Anti-virus integration: Firefox will inform anti-virus software when downloading executables.
• Easier password management: an information bar replaces the old password dialog so you can now save passwords after a successful login.
• New Download Manager: the revised download manager makes it much easier to locate downloaded files, and you can see and search on the name of the website where a file came from. Your active downloads and time remaining are always shown in the status bar as your files download.
• Resumable downloading: users can now resume downloads after restarting the browser or resetting your network connection.
• Integration with Windows: Firefox now has improved Windows icons, and uses native user interface widgets in the browser and in web forms.
• Integration with the Mac: the new Firefox theme makes toolbars, icons, and other user interface elements look like a native OS X application. Firefox also uses OS X widgets and supports Growl for notifications of completed downloads and available updates. A combined back and forward control make it even easier to move between web pages.
• Integration with Linux: Firefox’s default icons, buttons, and menu styles now use the native GTK theme.
• Smart Bookmarks Folder: quickly access your recently bookmarked and tagged pages, as well as your more frequently visited pages with the new smart bookmarks folder on your bookmark toolbar.
• Speed: improvements to our JavaScript engine as well as profile guided optimizations have resulted in continued improvements in performance. Compared to Firefox 2, web applications like Google Mail and Zoho Office run twice as fast in Firefox 3, and the popular SunSpider test from Apple shows improvements over previous releases.
• Memory usage: Several new technologies work together to reduce the amount of memory used by Firefox 3 over a web browsing session. Memory cycles are broken and collected by an automated cycle collector, a new memory allocator reduces fragmentation, hundreds of leaks have been fixed, and caching strategies have been tuned.
• Reliability: A user’s bookmarks, history, cookies, and preferences are now stored in a transactionally secure database format which will prevent data loss even if their system crashes.

Firefox 3 RC2;

• Release Notes
• Download.

Today, the initiative has paid off, with over 400 million downloads. Firefox is a better, safer and faster browser and can give you a much better web experience.

• Updated SQLite engine to version 3.3.17
• support for site-specific preferences–text size
• a new Quit dialog box that resolves termination errors
• added permanent ‘Restart Firefox’ button to Add-Ons Manager
• miscellaneous fixes to download manager including correctly displaying large file sizes
• various Places fixes
• and miscellaneous Gecko 1.9 bug fixes

It is the latter, the miscellaneous bug fixes within Gecko 1.9, that may affect Web and platform performance. Once again, Mozilla recommends this alpha release only for developers. Mozilla urges current users of Firefox 2 to wait until Firefox 3 is finally released in October or November of this year.

Via: CNet

Via: SoftPedia

Baker went on to say that it is a long term goal and not something that we should expect to see soon. APC Magazine has an intriguing interview with Mozilla Foundation CEO Mitchell Baker on the state of mobile web browsers and Mozilla’s plans to develop a mobile version of Firefox.

Baker says developers are working on a mobile browser, but says it’s a long term goal and nothing users should expect to see anytime soon. While the Minimo project is based on Mozilla, it isn’t an official product and it’s still a few (dozen) steps behind Opera Mobile when it comes to speed and performance.

Via: DownloadSquad

To start you off, here are some things people want:

• Native Form Widgets (currently scheduled for Firefox 3)
• Keychain Integration
• Firefox should have a Unified toolbar (not completely hopeless, it turns out)
• Performance could be better (as always)

If there are features in Camino/Safari/OmniWeb/iCab that you absolutely can’t live without, include them.

It has tones of useful features like a dynamic console, DOM tree explorer, CSS viewer/editor, script explorer and network monitor where you can see all Flash, XMLHttpRequest, JS and Image requests. Firebug is mainly used by web developers to trace bugs in their code but it can also be used to find and explore various browser and remote site vulnerabilities.

Unfortunately, Firebug suffers from rather simple but quite dangerous vulnerability. The vulnerability is of a type Cross-zone or Cross-context scripting, where a script from a web pages in injected inside the zone of the browser, also know as the chrome, or in the zone of the file: protocol. In both cases the result is quite devastating, although the second is a bit less critical then the first. Remote scripts in the browser are restricted by a sandbox. This means that everything that is prefixed with http: or https: is secure. Browser extensions make use of the chrome: protocol. This protocol is not restricted at all and everything is allowed. Therefor browser extensions are trusted. However if a remote script, tricks the browser into executing JavaScript expressions on chrome: then this script can take control of the entire chrome and also the underplaying operating system because then command execution and read/write file access are allowed.