It’s official. Mozilla has made the Firefox 3 Web browser available to the masses. After more than 34 months of active development and the contributions of thousands of people, Mozilla is promising this is the best browser — period.
Firefox 3 is based on the Gecko 1.9 Web-rendering platform. Building on the previous release, Gecko 1.9 has more than 15,000 updates, including some major re-architecting for improved performance, stability, rendering correctness, and code simplification and sustainability. The result, Mozilla said, is a more secure, easier to use, more personal product with more under the hood to offer Web-site and Firefox add-on developers.
Mozilla was hoping to break a world record for downloads in a single day and gain ground on its browser competitors. Firefox boasts more than 18 percent of the global market, according to Net Applications.
The response was so great Tuesday afternoon that the Mozilla.org site went down as consumers rushed to download the third major release of the open-source browser.
Designed for Security
Firefox 3 features advanced security protection to help Mozilla’s 175 million users avoid giving sensitive information to e-criminals. Firefox 3 supports Extended Validation (EV) Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) certificates.
When Internet users visit a site protected by VeriSign EV SSL certificates, the “Site Identity” button attached to the location bar changes color to indicate the level of identity information provided, offering immediate reassurance that they’ve reached a site whose authenticity has or has not been verified by VeriSign.
That kind of assurance is essential on today’s Internet, where identity thieves frequently lure consumers to impostor Web pages. Such fraudulent pages are a common tool for e-criminals bent on stealing sensitive personal information, from passwords to Social Security numbers. According to Netcraft, the number of sites live with EV SSL certificates has surpassed 6,000.
“To shield Web users from online crime rings…