Ready, steady, get Firefox
In a posting on the Mozilla blog, the Firefox development team has announced that Firefox 3 will be released on Tuesday 17 June. That will trigger a global download frenzy as Firefox fans scramble to not only download the latest release but also hopefully contribute to a new world record.
In an effort to promote the release of Firefox 3, the Spread Firefox campaign is recruiting supporters to set a new record for the most software downloaded in 24 hours (http://www.spreadfirefox.com/en-US/worldrecord/).
Although there is no pre-existing Guinness record for software downloads, more than 1.6 million copies of Firefox 2 were downloaded on the day it was launched, making that an obvious target.
"Let’s shoot for 5 million – the sky is the limit!" the team says on the download record site.
To date 1.5 million users have pledged to download Firefox 3 on the day it is released. In South Africa more than 3 700 users have joined the effort.
The Firefox team also sneaked out a third Release Candidate on June 11. Release candidates are intended to be feature-complete versions for final testing. Originally, only one release candidate was planned but a number of "showstopper" bugs forced the development team to release a second release candidate.
The unexpected third release candidate (RC3) was issued to fix a bug on Max OS X that saw Mozilla applications hanging. RC3 includes no other changes for platforms other than Mac OS X.