Firefox 3 Released

Last night at 18:00 BST the highly anticipated Firefox 3 browser was released. If you haven’t downloaded it yet what are you waiting for?

• Download Firefox 3

There’s a fantastic article available on Sitepoint which covers the new features and improvements over Firefox 2 but to summarise.

• A Streamlined User Interface
• New Download Manager
• Full page Zoom
• Improved Security
• Better Password Management
• Memory Management Improvements
• CSS Improvements
• Animated PNG images
• Microformats

To get a full idea of the improvements it’s worthwhile reading the SitePoint article but the way they sum up the new browser should give you a fair idea of how impressive Firefox 3 is.

Firefox 3 is—as with every major release—the best release of Firefox ever. This time, the number of new features that were released is truly impressive:

• End users will be pleased to use a much faster and prettier browser.
• Web developers won’t change the way they develop web sites, but may at least try to experiment with new HTML 5 elements and features.
• Extension developers will be able to interact with the browser’s internals more easily, thanks to the huge number of new APIs that have been made available (and are fully documented!).

With the number of downloads already having reached 5.7 million at the time of writing, it’ll be interesting to see what effect this release has on the browser market share with Internet Explorer’s version 8 out later this year.