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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.

The initial release candidate of Firefox 3 is ready for download for Windows, Mac, and Linux.

It's a public preview of the new Firefox code, available in 45 languages, aimed at developers and early adopters to test out the new features. It has an extensive list of known bugs.

Among the major improvements are changes in the look and feel on the various operating systems, major security enhancements, and increased performance and stability. It is based on the Gecko 1.9 rendering engine, which includes 14,000 updates to the code.

On the performance front, the documentation states that applications such as Google Mail and Zoho Office run twice as fast in Firefox 3, compared to Firefox 2, and memory usage has been improved. In addition, bookmarks, history, cookies, and preferences are less susceptible to data loss.

A list of all the new features is available on the Mozilla Firefox site.

Well, it took a few months, but Yahoo on Wednesday caught up to Firefox 3 with a beta plug-in for its Delicious bookmarking service.

The Firefox add-on for Delicious "now has full Firefox 3 support while retaining Firefox 2 compatibility," said Nick Nguyen, senior product manager for Delicious, in a blog posting.

Delicious lets people save their bookmarks online, tag them with descriptive keywords, and share them with other Delicious members.

It's only one plug-in, I know, but since I'd griped about its absence before, it's only fair for me to call out its availability for download now.

Firefox has a wealth of plug-ins to extend its abilities, but several don't work on Firefox 3, which is still in beta. Delicious is one very widely used tool, so the new plug-in should help lower barriers significantly.

The new plug-in also has a handful of features. None struck me as major, though the low-profile "classic mode" sounds promising; check the blog for a list.

Mozilla released its fifth beta version of Firefox 3 for Windows and the Mac on Wednesday, bringing a handful of improvements in ease of use to the open-source Web browser. A portable version is also available.

Overall, Firefox 3 beta 5 includes 750 changes from the previous beta, focusing on enhanced stability, Web site compatibility, and platform and user-interface improvements.

In the ease-of-use arena, Beta 5 is designed to offer improvements in integration with Windows, Mac, and Linux. The beta aims to show improvements to Windows icons, as well as native user interface widgets in Web forms and the browser.

Apple users, meanwhile, should see several enhancements to the new beta, such as a similar look and feel of a native OS X application for toolbars, icons, and other interface items. Beta 5 also supports Growl for completed download notifications and updates, in addition to using OS X widgets. And a combined back-and-forth control has been added for toggling between Web pages.

Linux users will find a native GTK design for Firefox's default icons, buttons, and menus.

Regarding performance, Beta 5 has souped up its JavaScript engine and profile-guided optimizations to double the speed in running Web applications, such as Google Mail and Zoho Office, Mozilla said.

Personalization also got a major enhancement with the new beta. Under the changes, users can view, organize, and search through bookmarks, tags, and browsing history via multiple views, in addition to storing frequent searches in smart folders.

While the latest Firefox beta has hundreds of changes, it's still short of the 900 tweaks in beta 4.