Firefox 3 now available

After more than 18 months of development and a slew of releases (including five alphas, five betas and three Release Candidates), the wait for Mozilla's Firefox 3 is over.

The Firefox 3 release aims to improve the Web experience for the browser's 170 million users while expanding market share even further, coming as it does months ahead of the next major release from Microsoft, Internet Explorer 8 (IE). Tons of tabbing, bookmarking, memory, security, and well, 15,000 improvements...

Mozilla conducted an application-specific test that compared relative performance on Google's Gmail service. Beltzner said Firefox 3 proved to be four times faster than Firefox 2 and seven times quicker than IE 7.

Memory usage also improved substantially in Firefox 3. Many users had complained about Firefox 2's memory-hogging tendencies, especially when multiple tabs remained open throughout the course of a day.

With today's release, Mozilla isn't just aiming to change its browser. It's also aiming to enter the Guinness Book of Records. Mozzilla is aiming for 5 million downloads, though there is some controversy here as the Adobe Flash Player has exceeded 10 million daily downloads in many occasions.