San Francisco - The latest version of the open source browser Firefox was officially released Tuesday, aiming to continue chipping away at the dominance of Microsoft's Internet Explorer. Firefox 3.0 offers faster web browsing than the previous versions, along with lower memory use and nifty features like a built-in search application that automatically combs your web history to find sites that you have visited that contain words that you type in the address bar.
The new version is also more secure with better safeguards against malware and phishing.
Tech critics greeted the new browser and recommended users to adopt it.
"Firefox 3 is the best Web browser I have ever seen. And I have been using the Web since before there were Web browsers," said ComputerWorld's Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols.
The open-source browser project is managed by the non-profit Mozilla organization, a descendant of the Netscape browser that was put out of business by Microsoft's Internet Explorer.
However Firefox has been rapidly attracting users since its 2004 launch and now has approximately 18 per cent of the market, compared to the 72 per cent share enjoyed by Internet Explorer which has the advantage of being preinstalled on the vast majority of computers.
Firefox is mainly downloaded by individual users and as of February 2008 it had been downloaded over 500 million times. However since one user may download the software several times, the best estimate for regular Firefox users is around 140 million.
With the official launch of Firefox 3, Mozilla is aiming to set the world record for most software downloads in 24 hours. Mozilla was hoping for 5 million downloads. However the download site was so inundated at the launch time (1700 GMT) that it became unavailable to many users.
