The wait is finally over. The much awaited version 3 of the award winning web browser is finally here. Firefox 3 (final version) was released on 17th June.

There are as many as 15,000 improvements over the previous version. It is safer,faster and smarter than ever before.

Download Firefox 3 from here or you can also download by clicking the firefox icon in the sidebar of this web page.

Features:

• Safer and faster internet:

  Avoid suspicious sites and internet frauds with simple and instant site identification. You will get a full browser screen size warning message when you you visit a web page attempting phishing or trying to inject malware into your PC. Web pages load faster than before.

• The “Awesome(location) Bar”:

This awesome bar is so awesome that nothing in business compares to it. Suppose you visited a website some time ago and want to visit it again but dont/vaguely

remember its name, type in whatever you remember about the site’s name and Firefox will find it for you. Now thats innovation.

It also lets you bookmark by a single clicking the “star” at the end of the bar. If you click the “start” twice, you can save it in desired folder and add a tag it.

• Tag:

You can tag a site with different keywords. Suppose you label 10 sites with keyword “games”. Now when you type games in the location bar, all the ten sites will

be shown. You can also add multiple labels to one site.

• Improved Search:

Search the Web in record time with smart keywords. With a few clicks you can assign keywords to search engines, and then simply enter your key and search words in

the location bar. With this feature, typing “book home building” can search Amazon.com, and take you right to books about home building without ever pausing at the

homepage.

• Better memory management:

The only issue that irks Firefox lovers is the amount of RAM it eats when you use much of its own USP, the add-ons.  The new version promises to be lighter faster in

the same regard.

• Full zoom:

Zoom into any picture on a web page you want seamlessly.

Its not even a week old and look at the response!

Mozilla also organized a Firefox 3 download day to set a world record of the most number of software download in a single day. The response was huge, i mean HUGE. Total downloads exceeded 8 million mark, 8,349,074 to be exact. It got a whopping 4% share in web browser market in just 24 hours of its release.

[Graphic SOURCE]

Total downloads have now reached 14789671 (as on Fri, 20 Jun 2008 19:04:26 GMT) and download per limit at the same time was 1015. Good going.

If you still havent downloaded it, download from here or you can also download by clicking the firefox icon in the sidebar of this web page.

Get it from here: Download Firefox 3 Beta 3

They have made some remarkable improvements over Firefox 2.You might think, on one hand there are people who work so hard to make an already a state of the art software even better and on other side you have MS. Any ways lets not get into it.

New features and changes in this milestone include:

• Improved security features such as: better presentation of website identity and security including support for Extended Validation (EV) SSL certificates, malware protection, stricter SSL error pages, anti-virus integration in the download manager.
• Improved ease of use through: easier add-on discovery and installation, improved download manager search and progress indication in the status bar, resumable downloading, full page zoom, and better integration with Windows Vista, Mac OS X and Linux.
• Richer personalization through: one-click bookmarking, smart bookmark folders, location bar that uses an algorithm based on site visit recency and frequency (called “frecency”) to provide better matches against your history and bookmarks for URLs and page titles, ability to register web applications as protocol handlers, and better customization of download actions for file types.
• Improved platform features such as: new graphics and font rendering architecture, JavaScript 1.8, major changes to the HTML rendering engine to provide better CSS, float-, and table layout support, native web page form controls, colour profile management, and offline application support.
• Performance improvements such as: better data reliability for user profiles, architectural improvements to speed up page rendering, over 350 memory leak fixes, a new XPCOM cycle collector to reduce entire classes of leaks, and reductions in the memory footprint.

If you dint upgrade to Beta 2 (like me,for addons compatibility issue) earlier,upgrade now and you wont regret,though you might miss some of your add ons.I upgraded to Beta 3 on Vista.Though im writing this on ver 2 on XP. But one this is sure,working on FF3 is a treat.I found that on just one day of using FF 3.So if you have a dual boot machine try FF 3 on one of the OS.
For helping you make your mind,read these reviews at Sathyasays.com:

Mozilla firefox 3 Beta 2 impressions

Mozilla firefox 3 Beta 3 impressions