The Much awaited firefox 3 was released @ 6pm BST today. It has been on three years of development. Mozilla is hoping to set a Guinness World Record for the most number of downloads of an application in a day, on the release of the browser. During the first 24 hours of Firefox 3’s release, Mozilla is aiming for over 1.6 million downloads and hoping for five million.

The third incarnation of Firefox rides on the new Gecko 1.9 rendering engine. This means stability and speed. The new version of Gecko improves on Javascript 2 compatability and adds better support for XUL applications. HTML5 and CSS3 definitions are still not fully supported, but Javascript developers will be able to create more advanced plug-ins, like FireFTP and maybe even a smoother version of Flickr Uploadr inside the browser shell.

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