I last covered a full review of the Firefox 3.0 beta 2 browser way back in December 2007 (Read Here) Mozilla has announced that June 17 is the official date of the much-anticipated Firefox 3 release. Developers and open source software enthusiasts are planning parties all over the world to celebrate the occasion.

Mozilla is encouraging users to participate, too, by helping the Firefox team set the record for the most software downloaded in 24 hours. The total number of unique downloads that take place on release day will be submitted for potential inclusion in the Guinness World Records. Over a million users have already signed up to pledge their support. A website for this also been dedicated fro the pledges. Click Here

Many readers have asked about the status of Firefox 3 add-on compatibility and some have indicated that they won’t be ready to upgrade until their favorite add-ons are supported. Mozilla Product Manager Alex Polvi has written a brief overview that explains the current status of the most popular add-ons. Some of my favorites, like Greasemonkey, Firebug, and Stylish are now all compatible with Firefox 3.

Unfortunately, Google Browser Sync is being discontinued and will no longer be supported. Google recommends that users adopt Mozilla Weave ( A post I write on Last year) or Foxmarks.

Mozilla’s add-on team has been hard at work getting a new version of the add-on web site ready in time for the release. The new site includes a theme browser that displays thumbnails and a new advanced search system, as well as numerous improvements for developers.

Planning is already in progress for Firefox 3.1, which is codenamed Shiretoko. Although still in the early stages of planning, the schedule indicates that alpha releases could be available as early as July. Prominent user interface features planned for the 3.1 release include tab previews and tag auto-completion. Developers also plan to add several new features to Firefox’s Gecko rendering engine such as the HTML 5 video element and CSS text shadows.

Now that Microsoft’s own IE8 beta 1 is also in the market and Microsoft is itself planning to release IE8 after 2006 release of IE7, will it make a difference, IE8 has great feature such as web slices and auto-recovery etc. But can IE regain it’s market share. Developers and users such as me have reported that Firefox is becoming more of a memory hog. But lets see what is instored for us.

You can download the new software from sidelink given on this page…

Comment your Views on this new initiative.

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