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Which is the world's fastest browser? According to Zimbra, Safari runs fastest, though it didn't beat out Firefox by much. Both Safari and Firefox were roughly twice as fast as Microsoft's Internet Explorer 7.

Of course, Zimbra was testing for how these browsers perform with the Zimbra Web application. Your mileage may vary with other applications. In fact, I'd love to see a wide range of tests for different sites and applications. Who's next?

As an aside, I continue to be impressed at how Zimbra treats non-Microsoft platforms as first-class citizens (along with Microsoft). Firefox is the same way. Both allow you to run on the Mac, for example, without losing any functionality that you'd find in Windows/IE.

It's called great code. Weak developers write code that limps on anything but Windows. Great developers write code that ports well to diverse platforms.

Take this statistic with a grain of salt, but Mozilla said more than 8 million copies of Firefox 3 were downloaded in its first 24 hours online.

Mozilla, which is behind the open-source Web browser, was trying to set a download record for the software. The 24-hour period lasted from 11:16 a.m. PDT Tuesday to the same time Wednesday, and Mozilla said it's waiting for the Guinness Book of World Records to review the results.

Mozilla showed more than 8 million copies of Firefox 3 were downloaded in its first 24 hours online.

(Credit: Mozilla)

The download rate, which peaked at 14,000 per minute Tuesday, was still going strong at more than 6,000 per minute Wednesday morning.

Next question: will it make a difference?

Mozilla fanned the fanboy flames with its download record attempt, but it's likely the majority of those who downloaded Firefox 3 at this stage will just use it to replace Firefox 2, not a competitor such as Microsoft's still-dominant Internet Explorer or Apple's third-place Safari.

There's also a big difference between downloading Firefox, installing it, using it, and switching to it as the primary browser. One early sign shows at a minimum, though, that Firefox 3 usage is significant at more than 4 percent share, according to Net Applications.

And don't forget the error bars: it's impossible to say how many of the Firefox 3 copies were installed by enthusiasts trying to goose the number.

And while 8.3 million might well become an audited record, Adobe blogger and evangelist Ryan Stewart pointed out that Adobe gets 8 million installations of the Flash plug-in on an average day.

Don't let my note of skepticism detract from the occasion, though. This might have been just a PR stunt, but the fact that Mozilla's Download Day drew as much attention as it did indicates that Firefox is more than just a piece of software. It's a movement people want to belong to.

For full coverage, including reviews and videos, see CNET's Firefox 3 resource center.

With less than an hour to go in Mozilla's 24-hour attempt to set a record for the most downloads, I check in with CNET News.com's Stephen Shankland, about the launch of Firefox 3. Despite Mozilla's temporary site outage, it appears to have been a success, both with the numbers (7 million plus) and content.

As a Firefox user myself, I initially switched over for the tabbed browsing and some of the third party add-ons. Little did I know that I was building my "nerd cred" by choosing it over Internet Explorer or other browsers. As Shankland explains, being a fan of Firefox is almost like being an Apple fanboy: there's a certain cachet and a "stick-it-to-the-man" (that'd be Microsoft) attitude among its users. Who knew that the browser you chose could up your stock?

Firefox 3 gained market share rapidly, even before it was 24 hours old.

(Credit: Net Applications)

Firefox 3 is spreading fast, claiming more than 4 percent of the share of Web browser usage less than 24 hours after its release.

According to Net Applications, which monitors browser usage at major Web sites, Firefox 3 rapidly ascended to what I'd call force-to-be-reckoned-with status, something Web designers shouldn't be ignoring. For comparison, Apple's Safari had 6.25 percent share in May, and Opera had 0.71 percent.

Undoubtedly, most Firefox 3 activity is from existing Firefox users, but it's still a notable achievement, given that software companies constantly struggle to get users to adopt the latest products.

Mozilla, which sponsors and oversees development of the open-source Web browser, released Firefox 3 for download on Tuesday. It primed the publicity pump with an effort to set a 24-hour download record, and interest by the abundant Firefox loyalists brought Mozilla's servers to their knees for nearly two hours Wednesday.

Mozilla has been fulfilling pent-up demand ever since. Sometime after 7 a.m. PDT, downloads crossed the 7 million mark, according to Mozilla's download counter, which is fun to watch, even though it's badly formatted.

The download rate, which peaked at 14,000 per minute Tuesday, was about 6,600 per minute Wednesday morning.

For full coverage, including reviews and videos, see CNET's Firefox 3 resource center.

Web site problems held up the launch of Firefox 3 on Tuesday.

The Get Firefox site went down near the 10 a.m. PDT launch time. Mozilla, the for-profit subsidiary of the Mozilla Foundation that oversees Firefox development, said it was having technical difficulties with the site.

Firefox 3 downloads surpassed 1.4 million before four hours had gone by.

(Credit: Mozilla)

Mozilla hopes to set a 24-hour record for most downloads with Firefox 3, but the delay shouldn't affect that much. "The 24-hour period starts when the site goes live," spokeswoman Melissa Shapiro said.

Update 10:51 a.m. PDT: Mozilla said in a blog posting that the site should be available "shortly."

"The outpouring of interest and enthusiasm around Firefox 3 has been overwhelming (literally!). Our servers are currently feeling the burn and should be back to normal shortly. Download day will officially commence once the site goes live," Mozilla said.

Update 10:57 a.m. PDT: Popular projects are tough to bring to the Web for mass download.

Ubuntu's Feisty Fawn version of Linux was run over by Intenet traffic when it launched in 2007. Likewise, Sun Microsystems couldn't keep up when it released the source code for OpenOffice.

Mozilla is trying to set a record for Firefox 3 downloads. Site problems hampered the effort.

Red Hat has used BitTorrent to try to distribute download pain among many interested users of its Fedora version of Linux. That's not a great solution if you want to track your download record, though.

Update 11:17 a.m. PDT: The download page was back up for me, fleetingly--but it only showed the link for Firefox 2.0.0.14.

Update 11:20 a.m. PDT: The site is up, and the download link is working for me. Let the record attempt begin.

Update 11:30 a.m. PDT: Whoops! The download I'm getting from the download pages is still for version 2.0.0.14. I guess there's still some work to be done.

The Mozilla page redesign has a crazy combination of Firefox 3 graphics but Firefox 2.0.0.14 files, but at least the Web site is crawling back.

Update 11:49 a.m. PDT: This is like Amazon.com's outage all over again: Now all I'm getting is "Http/1.1 Service Unavailable." The Web site is totally gone again.

Update 11:53 a.m. PDT: The site is working, both the Get Firefox site and the U.S. download page.

Also, for some more details, see the Firefox 3 release notes.

Update 12:01 p.m. PDT: The clock is ticking for the download record attempt. The official 24-hour period began at 11:16 a.m. PDT, when the download began working in Europe, Mozilla told me.

The redesigned Mozilla site was a hodgepodge of Firefox 3 and 2.0.0.14 versions as it crept back online.

(Credit: Mozilla)

Also, be cautious about updating: Firefox 3 will overwrite your Firefox 2 installation. The release candidate has been stable for me, but not all plug-ins are available; Microsoft warned that Silverlight 1.0 doesn't work on Firefox 3, and there could be other issues.

Update 12:05 p.m. PDT: Mozilla said on its developer blog that Firefox 3 is being downloaded at a rate of 14,000 copies per minute.

That's 13 gigabits per second. No wonder the servers were struggling.

Update 12:15 p.m. PDT: Say what you want about its ability to deliver the technology, but it's impressive what Mozilla has built around Firefox. A download rate of 233 copies per second is pretty staggering.

You can call the download record an attempt at a PR stunt if you want, but clearly it's more than that. Evidently there are a lot of people for whom using Firefox makes them feel like part of some movement.

Is it because it's open-source software? A way to stick it to Microsoft? Technologically superior? Helped by plug-ins? Something else? Weigh in below so those who aren't true believers can see why you are. Or send me e-mail at stephen.shankland@cnet.com.

Update 12:55 p.m. PDT: The Firefox 3 download counter (when it works) currently shows more than 875,000 downloads.

Say what you will about Google's plain-jane text-heavy Web sites, but they load faster than the eye candy such as all those pretty flags on the download counter page.

Update 2:46 p.m. PDT: Mozilla's Spread Firefox site shows more than 1.4 million downloads so far. The rate is tapering down--it's less than 10,000 copies per minute now.

Update 4:25 p.m. PDT: The download rate has wound down to about 5,400 per second, but the total has surpassed 2 million.

Update 5:20 p.m.: It looks like Firefox's biggest rival is being big-hearted about Download Day: Microsoft shipped an Internet Explorer cake to Mozilla.

The cake reads: "Congratulations on shipping. Love, the IE Team."

Update 12:23 p.m. PDT: The official Firefox 3 download site is live; the record-setting attempt began at 11:16 a.m. PDT. Update 10:53 a.m PDT: See this separate blog post on the Mozilla download site troubles. Update 10:02 a.m. PDT: Mozilla is having some technical issues with the site but expects the download to be available shortly. Update 6:43 a.m. PDT: I added the scheduled launch time, 10 a.m. PDT.

Mozilla plans to release Firefox 3 on Tuesday, and the open-source project is opening a new front in the browser wars.

As the Web transforms from a static repository of content into a foundation for applications such as word processors and graphics editors, browsers are growing up from mere gateways into the tool that makes those applications possible. In this new era, it's Firefox--the heir to the Netscape legacy--that's going up against the victor of the last era, Internet Explorer.

"It gives you the horsepower you need to experience rich Internet apps as they should be from a performance standpoint," said Damon Sicore, Mozilla's director of platform engineering, mentioning Gmail and Google Maps specifically as applications where users don't want to wait. "As these apps get bigger and more complicated, faster browsers are going to become more critical."

The Firefox 3 'awesome bar' can give faster access to Web addresses.

Specifically, it takes 60 milliseconds to change Gmail from showing one message to another with Firefox 3, Sicore said, compared with 413 milliseconds for IE 7 and 227 for Firefox 2.

Microsoft is toiling away on IE8, though, with a first beta released and a second scheduled to emerge in August. The program has been reworked to improve performance, said Dean Hachamovitch, Microsoft's general manager in charge of IE. With no prompting, he mentioned Gmail as one area where the company has received favorable feedback, and he clearly welcomes the competition.

"IE is the browser of choice for more people on the Web than anything else," Hachamovitch said. "There's an all-around quality, whether in ease of use, reliability, the security we stand by, that makes it a better choice."

Vying for share
Mozilla is a force to be reckoned with, with 18 percent market share to 74 for IE, according to Net Applications statistics. That's enough to ensure that major Web sites have to support Firefox.

Apple's Safari--now available for Windows, too, is in third place with 6 percent share. The next contender, Opera, has less than 1 percent, but it's scrappy: "The browser is the single most important piece of software made today, so innovation is incredibly important if you want to extend the reach of the Web," the company said in a statement.

Firefox is the second-ranked browser in market share for May 2008.

(Credit: Net Applications)

Microsoft knows the stakes are high, with a richer Web coming into being. "It is a particularly fertile period. A bunch of pieces started lining up magically in the last couple years to get some innovation going here," Hachamovitch said

Firefox isn't shying away from competition either. To try to heighten its profile, Mozilla hopes to set a 24-hour download record with Firefox 3, which has been code-named Gran Paradiso. The download period is scheduled to begin at 10 a.m. PDT.

Perhaps a more fruitful alternative to whipping fans into a lather through, though, would be to court business users.

"Mozilla needs to show corporations some love," said Forrester analyst Thomas Mendel in a recent report. "Large-scale, companywide deployments are not yet typical. Mozilla continues to expend little energy on wooing IT managers to formally adopt Firefox," for example by offering paid support services, he said.

Firefox 3 features
Faster performance is one Firefox 3 improvement Sicore points to. Two others are better memory handling and what's known as the "awesome bar."

To test memory use, Firefox programmers load 500 pages from top sites on the Web then closes and opens them thousands of times. Through that process, Mozilla stamped out many memory "leaks" under which Firefox 2 wouldn't relinquish memory once it was no longer needed, Sicore said. The company also reduced the amount of memory the browser requires overall.

But memory is hidden under the covers. Front and center is awesome bar, officially called the Smart Location Bar, which lets users type real words rather than sometimes abstruse URL addresses to call up Web sites.

For example, typing "maps" into the bar on my computer retrieves a list of some recent stories I've written involving maps as well as recent maps I've requested off the Internet. That's handy for retrieving recently visited Web sites quickly. Another example of how the feature worked well: I was trying to relocate a Web site I used to monitor Amazon.com's Web site performance, and typing "Amazon" into the bar showed the site--GrabPerf--as one of the options.

Mozilla uses its own formula to determine what results pop up in the list, weighting by factors such as how recently and how frequently you visited various sites. Typing "n" gets me to News.com in no time flat, but your own results will vary according to your browsing habits.

Firefox 3 has been steadily climbing in usage through its testing period.

(Credit: Net Applications)

The awesome bar has its detractors who'd like the feature to be optional. (Tweakers can disable the awesome bar by editing their Firefox configuration.)

Among other features in Firefox 3:

• A prominent warning when a user tries to open a page that has been shown to host malware such as viruses or spyware or that's involved in phishing--the attempt to fool people into entering personal information into a counterfeit Web site.

•  Offline data access, a feature that can make Web applications usable even when the network is unavailable. That's a potential boon for Web apps, but future versions of IE 8 and Safari also support the technology.

Web-based protocol handlers, which lets the browser launch a Web application rather than a PC program for certain actions such as a Web site "mailto" link that otherwise would create an e-mail in software such as Outlook.

• The Cairo graphics engine that lays the foundation for better direct integration with a computer's video hardware. "Video inside the browser is coming," Sicore said.

• animated PNG (Portable Network Graphics), another nail in the coffin of the GIF (Graphics Interchange Format) image type.

• A better full-page zoom feature that devotes maximum screen real estate to the browser. Moving the mouse pointer over a thin strip across the top of the screen temporarily pulls down the browser controls.

• A star button to quickly add bookmarks; double-clicking opens a dialog box that lets users describe bookmarks with tags.

• Support for Windows Vista's parental controls.

• And better support for Mac OS X. For example, it has a Mac-native appearance and has been re-plumbed internally to use Apple's Cocoa technology, a necessary step on the road toward 64-bit support.

Plug-in problems
One of Firefox's claims to fame is the wide collection of add-ons that are available. It's been a bumpy ride coaxing coders to support the new browser, though.

Some major add-ons now have arrived, including Yahoo's Delicious and the Firebug tool for Web site developers.

However, not everybody made the leap. One is Google Browser Sync, which synchronizes bookmarks, passwords, and other settings across multiple installations of Firefox 2. "Phasing out Google Browser Sync was a tough call, but we have decided to focus our efforts on other products, like Toolbar and Gears, that also extend the capability of multiple browsers," Google said of the Labs project in a statement. Happily, there are other alternatives--I like Foxmarks.

Of the top add-ons, "the majority have upgraded 3.0," Sicore said. The laggards will have a grace period "on the order of months" before Firefox 2.0 versions will automatically suggest installing the upgrade.

I'm a Firefox user, how about you? If you're part of the roughly 20 percent market share using Mozilla's free, open-source Web-browsing software, you're probably looking forward to Tuesday, June 17th's release of version 3. In fact, the company is hoping that 1 million of you are excited in hopes of setting a record for the most downloads in a 24-hour period.

In Friday's edition of the Daily Debrief, I chat with CNET Webware.com's Rafe Needleman about what to expect with this version. He's been using the release candidate for a few weeks and says we can look forward to faster browsing, the "awesome bar," and more security features.

Gears, Google's project to make Web browsers a better foundation for elaborate online applications, now supports Firefox 3, the company plans to announce soon.

"Gears for Firefox 3, as of today, is available for all users," said Aaron Boodman, a Google programmer working on the Gears project, in an interview Tuesday. "We hope to announce it either today or tomorrow."

Indeed, the Google Gears code site lists Firefox 3 support in version 0.3 description. Firefox 3 itself is due this month; the open-source browser currently is in its second release candidate.

Google is working on Gears--formerly called Google Gears--as a way to advance Web programming. It's a key enabler to the cloud computing model exemplified with Web applications such as Google Docs and Gmail.

The company hopes features developed for Gears will eventually settle into HTML, the standard used to describe Web pages. There has been some success: the offline page access and internal database technology released in the first Gears incarnation, has made its way to the HTML 5 specification under development.

At the Google I/O conference conference in May, the company described several Gears features under development--though not promised--for Gears. The Gears history page is more specific about two of those features, listing the "blob" module and the geolocation module as "in the oven" for Gears 0.4.

The blob module lets a Web browser handle a large chunk of data in pieces, for example, uploading a large video bit by bit to better protect against unreliable network connections. The geolocation module gives browsers abilities to use data about where exactly a person using the Web is located, but Google hasn't worked out exactly how to handle the privacy implications of that work.

Also demonstrated in version 3 is the ability to make a Web site into a shortcut users can drop onto their computer desktops. That feature is built into Gears 0.3.

The primary initial feature of Gears was offline access to Web applications, which has obvious utility for somebody editing a spreadsheet on an airplane. Future Gears features, such as the geolocation technology, likely will have broader adoption on Web applications, he predicted.

"We started with offline, a very hard feature because it involves synchronizing data with multiple computers," Boodman said. "I don't think every Web app needs offline. But as we add additional capabilities beyond just offline, it will be appealing to more Web sites."

Gears, an open-source project, already supports Firefox 2 and Internet Explorer. Google is working hard on a version for Apple's Safari browser, and Opera is extending support to its own desktop and mobile browsers.

"We do plan to make it work across all major browsers across all major platforms," said Sundar Pichai, the Google vice president in charge of Gears, iGoogle, Google Desktop, Gadgets, and various other products.

Gears has been downloaded hundreds of thousands of times, Google said, and the company expects it to spread. Also at Google I/O, MySpace announced it's using Gears to augment its online inbox.

Google isn't alone in the area: Yahoo is working on a conceptually similar project called BrowserPlus to improve Web browsers.

Firefox is set to top 20 percent global market share in July, continuing its steady trend toward world domination through, er, open-source liberation.

Unlike Microsoft's Internet Explorer, which relied on all sorts of tricks and tying to achieve its dominant status, Firefox's gains seem to be coming for two reasons:

1. It works better (Better security, better performance, better functionality).
2. It's much more customizable.

As ReadWriteWeb points out, the game is increasingly Firefox's to lose. Internet Explorer used to command 96 percent of the market. Now it's struggling to hold onto 80 percent, with Firefox chipping away, 1 percent at a time.

Better software doesn't always win. In today's market, in fact, the superior marketing budget generally wins.

But not in the IE versus Firefox war, for some reason. Firefox continues to gain market share. Perhaps this time "better" really will translate into market share.