Firefox Fans: Today Is The Day

Today is the official launch day for Mozilla Firefox 3. What’s more, they want your help in setting a world record.

When you go to the main site, they are still offering Firefox 2. You can, though, download Firefox 3 Release Candidate 3 here. The disconnect is because of timing. They want to have the most number of downloads in a 24 hour period, so everybody has to start at the same time.

If you are on the east coast, expect to see Firefox 3 go officially live at 1PM today. West coasters, that’s 10AM for you. You can refer to this map for reference from Labnol.org. If you don’t want to wait, you can get it in Mozilla’s public FTP, however I just assume wait and help these guys reach their goal.

The goal for the day is 5 million downloads. Perhaps with the increased social media usage this time around, they will hit it. It is a steep goal, though. Firefox 2 only hit 1.5 million downloads on day one. The number of pledges on SpreadFirefox.com to download it in the alotted time is just over 1.6 million as of this post.

For anybody still running Internet Explorer, I suggest you give Firefox a go. It is free and it is better than IE. Among the many reasons I prefer Firefox, the vast selection of add-ons available for Firefox is my favorite selling point. Just because Microsoft bundles Internet Explorer with Windows doesn’t make it the best web browser.

And as a long time Firefox user, I see definite improvements in version 3. Yes, for me, it is still a memory hog. But, that’s me. There are plenty of people out there reporting much improved memory usage for Firefox 3.

I’ll help them out and upgrade to Firefox 3 Final today.