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Firefox 3 powers to a smashing download record

Mozilla has succeeded beyond its wildest dreams, receiving more than its hoped for 5 million downloads of Firefox 3 in less than 14 hours. So for the first day of the new browser's life, it's onward to 7 million!

The download record period officially began at 11.16am US Pacific Daylight Time on Tuesday.

A pre-publication check showed the count had reached 5,079,227.

Since there is no existing Guinness world record for downloads, there is no specific number that must be reached. Organisers were hoping to at least exceed the 1.6 million downloads of Firefox 2 on its launch day, and that was reached in five hours.

"We are currently serving almost 9,000 downloads a minute, which puts us on track to achieve 5-7 million downloads our first day of general availability," said Mozilla's Paul Kim in the organisation's blog http://blog.mozilla.com/ at 3.26pm.

Hot spots accounting for more than 100,000 downloads include the US (over 2 million downloads), Canada, Brazil. the UK, France, Spain, Italy, Germany, Poland, Iran and China and japan.

Australia's doing well on a per-capita basis, with over 83,000 downloads.

The release of the new version seems likely to increase Firefox's market share. Mozilla's Blog of Metrics recently noted "rapid adoption" of the release candidate along with continued growth of Firefox 2 usage.

According to Net Applications, Firefox (all versions) took a 18.41 percent browser share in May 2008, compared with 73.75 for Internet Explorer and 6.25 for Safari. Firefox and Safari have both been gaining ground at the expense of Internet Explorer. Opera has also improved its share by a healthy proportion, but is still a distant fourth on 0.71 percent.

Firefox has a particularly strong following in Europe. According to XiTi Monitor, its average browser share across Europe for March 2008 was 28.8 percent.

XiTi Monitor also reports that Firefox has a 31.2 percent browser share in Oceania, which includes Australia, New Zealand and the Pacific Islands.

Key features of Firefox 3 include a 'smart' location bar which adapts to user preferences, page display that's two to three times faster than Firefox 2, security improvements, and an add-ons manager. In all, more than 15,000 improvements have been made.

Firefox 3 is available for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux from Mozilla's GetFirefox site.

Updated from 2.0.0.14 on two machines and can’t seem to download any addons. No matter which I pick it tells me the hash is wrong. I can’t believe all the addon XPI’s are corrupt, but it doesn’t say anything about version compatibility, just says the hash is bad. And the ones I’m trying to download are ones I’ve already downloaded on other machines while running 2.0.0.14. What gives? Is the hash calculator in 3.0 hosed? Anyone else having problems with this?

From CBet News:

Firefox 3 suffers its first vulnerability
Less than one day after its launch, Firefox 3 has a vulnerability.
According to Tipping Point's Zero Day Initiative, the vulnerability, which it rates as critical, was reported within the first five hours of Firefox 3's release.
"Once the vulnerability was verified in TippingPoint's DVLabs and acquired from the researcher, the vulnerability was promptly reported to the Mozilla security team," said a representative.
Although the Zero Day Initiative team does not offer specifics until the vendor has a chance to patch it, the blog post did say this vulnerability, which also affects Firefox 2, requires user interaction and could result in an attacker executing arbitrary code.
Mozilla is reported to be working on a fix.
The Zero Day Initiative has been criticized in the past for paying researchers who find vulnerabilities.

Be careful out there, still people