Firefox 3 Crosses 5 Million Download in 24 Hours: Guiness Record

Firefox 3 crosses 5 million downloads in 24 hours, despite teething network problems due to massive site load. Firefox 3 comes with over 15, 000 improvements. The key improvements of Firefox 3 are:

Performance & Resource
Speed: 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.

Ease of use
Full page zoom: from the View menu and via keyboard shortcuts, the new zooming feature lets you zoom in and out of entire pages, scaling the layout, text and images, or optionally only the text size. Your settings will be remembered whenever you return to the site. This will be a boon for the vision deficients and for deciphering websites with very small fonts.

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.
Users can now resume downloads after restarting the browser or resetting your network connection. They finally fixed the bugs in download manager.

There are lots of improvements in tab management and behavior.

Podcasts and Videocasts can now be associated with your media playback tools.

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.

Security
One-click site info: You can 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.

Malware Protection: Malware protection warns users when they arrive at sites which are known to install viruses, spyware, trojans or other malware. This was available since Firefox 2.

New Web Forgery Protection page: the content of pages suspected as web forgeries is no longer shown.

Secure add-on updates: Add-ons that provide insecure updates are disabled.

Anti-virus software integration: Firefox will inform anti-virus software when downloading executables. This will be useful in conjunction with Anti-virus vendor support.

Vista Parental Controls: Firefox now respects the Microsoft Windows Vista system-wide parental control setting for disabling file downloads.

Effective top-level domain (eTLD) service better restricts cookies and other restricted content to a single domain. This provides better protection against cross-site-scripting attacks. Additionally Firefox 3 provides better protection against cross-site JSON data leaks.

Assorted Improvements
Star button: quickly add bookmarks from the location bar with a single click; a second click lets you file and tag them.

Tags: associate keywords with your bookmarks to sort them by topic. I love it.

Smart Location Bar: You can type in all or part of the title, tag or address of a page to see a list of matches from your history and bookmarks; a new display makes it easier to scan through the matching results and find that page you’re looking for. Results are returned according to their a combination of frequency, and recency of visits to that page, ensuring that you’re seeing the most relevant matches. An adaptive learning algorithm further tunes the results to your patterns!

Web-based protocol handlers: web applications, such as your favorite webmail provider, can now be used instead of desktop applications for handling mailto: links from other sites. Similar support is available for other protocols (Web applications will have to first enable this by registering as handlers with Firefox). This is a significant enhancement for web 2 service providers.

Improved Platform for Developers
Offline support: enables web applications to provide offline functionality (website authors must add support for offline browsing to their site for this feature to be available to users).

What are you waiting for? Download it here?