Firefox 3. Wow. So, I guess I was kinda wrong about the release of Firefox 3 not being hyped as much as Firefox 2’s release was. Here we are: Download Day.

What happened last night? Well, Mozilla had so much traffic their servers went down. Now i’m guessing it takes a little more than the normal amount of traffic directed at Mozilla’s data centre to bring all of its sites down completely, but amazingly about an hour and a half after the launch of Firefox 3 was meant to be, I started seeing the new site and faster loading speeds.

Mozilla are expecting the final amount of downloads for the full 24 hours since Firefox 3 was oficially released to be between 5-7 Million, which is counting only full downloads from different computers. I’ve contributed to the world record attempt on three separate occasions, which isn’t much, but if everybody contributed by downloading it three times, Mozilla would have a near to impossible record for anyone else to beat.

The final version of Firefox isn’t any different from the last release candidate to the end user, and probably only has minor tweaks to it under the hood. But, it’s still an amazingly fast and cool browser, with noticeable speed improvements and new features that are big improvements to Firefox 2, and the excuses not to use it over IE are virtually non-existent. The awesome new site is bound to attract the eye of potentially new Firefox users, especially as it offers more extensive help and information on the new browser version - and even a page that compares the browser to IE. Mozilla have done a good job, and hopefully this will increase the current market share of Firefox and give the team a good popularity boost in the browser wars.

Firefox 3 truly is the best Firefox yet, and if you haven’t already support the record attempt by download the amazing piece of free software that is Firefox. You will not regret it.