Mozilla wants to have their shining logo grace the legendary pages of The Guinness Books of World Records; and it shouldn’t be too hard either considering they seem to be pioneering their very own category: Most Software Downloaded in 24 Hours. Had I but known that you could enter your own category, I would have long ago taken first place in, Most Peanut M&M’s Consumed While Watching Reruns of Saved By The Bell. However I am not sure that a Guinness category like that is in the same kind of demand as an ‘Internet’-related category. Being as the Internet is still a fairly new concept in terms of seasoned organizations like Guinness (Est. 1955), the chapter on Internet world records is fairly bare and it is pretty cool indeed that Mozilla is taking a step to beef it up.
So what exactly is this fancy new software that Mozilla is asking everyone to pledge to download on Download Day 2008? Well, it is the brand new version of Firefox (titled Firefox 3) and it is apparently chock-full of web-browser-y goodness boasting over 14,000 changes and new features.
There is an excellent article on tgdaily.com entitled, Why Firefox 3 Matters and it outlines the first impressions and initial reviews of a few web savvy users. From the looks of this article, Firefox 3 is going to be a pretty smart download.
Firefox 3 is a massive upgrade over Firefox 2 with more than 14,000 changes over the 2.0 generation that was released in October of 2006. The great majority of those changes happened under the hood and aren’t immediately visible to, but there are enough user-centric improvements to make this new version a worthwhile update.