Editor’s note: Mozilla released a security and stability update for Firefox 3.x users today. Check out the Mozilla Developer News announcement reposted below for more details.

Firefox 3.0.1 security and stability update now available for download

As part of Mozilla Corporation’s ongoing stability and security update process, Firefox 3.0.1 is now available for Windows, Mac, and Linux for free download from http://getfirefox.com/.

We strongly recommend that all Firefox users upgrade to this latest release. If you already have Firefox 3.0, you will receive an automated update notification within 24 to 48 hours. This update can also be applied manually by selecting “Check for Updates…” from the Help menu.

For a list of changes and more information, please review the Firefox 3.0.1 Release Notes.

Note: All Firefox 2.0.0.x users are encouraged to upgrade to Firefox 3.0.1 by downloading it from http://getfirefox.com/.

Editor’s note: Mozilla released a security and stability update for Firefox 2.x users today. Check out the Mozilla Developer News announcement reposted below for more details.

Firefox 2.0.0.16 security and stability update now available for download

As part of Mozilla Corporation’s ongoing stability and security update process, Firefox 2.0.0.16 is now available for Windows, Mac, and Linux for free download from http://www.mozilla.com/firefox/all-older.html.

We strongly recommend that all Firefox 2.x users upgrade to this latest release. If you already have Firefox 2.x, you will receive an automated update notification within 24 to 48 hours. This update can also be applied manually by selecting “Check for Updates…” from the Help menu.

For a list of changes and more information, please review the Firefox 2.0.0.16 Release Notes.

Note: Firefox 2.0.0.x will be maintained with security and stability updates until mid-December, 2008. All users are encouraged to upgrade to Firefox 3.

Editor’s note: Mozilla announced Firefox 2.0.0.15 security and stability update available for download on Tuesday, July 1st, 2008 at 2:47 pm PST. See Sam Sidler’s comprehensive post on Mozilla Developer News, crossposted below.

As part of Mozilla Corporation’s ongoing stability and security update process, Firefox 2.0.0.15 is now available for Windows, Mac, and Linux for free download from http://www.mozilla.com/firefox/all-older.html.

We strongly recommend that all Firefox users upgrade to this latest release. If you already have Firefox 2.x, you will receive an automated update notification within 24 to 48 hours. This update can also be applied manually by selecting “Check for Updates…” from the Help menu.

For a list of changes and more information, please review the Firefox 2.0.0.15 Release Notes.

Note: Firefox 2.0.0.x will be maintained with security and stability updates until mid-December, 2008. All users are encouraged to upgrade to Firefox 3.

Note: Please do not link directly to the download site. Instead we strongly encourage you to link to this Firefox 2.0.0.15 security and stability update announcement so that everyone will know what this milestone is, what they should expect, and who should be downloading to participate in testing at this stage of development.

We’re getting close to handing over our download logs to our judges for our Guinness World Record attempt.  We’re very lucky and honored to have Paul Vixie of the Internet Systems Consortium and Corey Shields of Indiana University.

Here is a little background on them both:

Paul Vixie has been contributing to Internet protocols and UNIX systems as a protocol designer and software architect since 1980, and was a cofounder of ISC in 1994. Early in his career, he developed and introduced SENDS, proxynet, rtty, cron and other lesser-known tools. Paul is considered the primary modern author and technical architect of BIND8, the most commonly used DNS server on the Internet.

Corey Shields is the Lead Systems Analyst for the High Performance Systems group in University Information Technology Services at Indiana University. Corey has had a long history as an open source software user,  advocate, and contributor.  He has made contributions to many open source projects including Mozilla and the Gentoo Linux distribution, and spent a couple of years managing the Open Source Lab  (OSL) at Oregon State University.

Currently, Corey is working with a team of administrators on the BigRed supercomputer at Indiana University.  BigRed is the 42nd fastest supercomputer in the world, and relies on open source software to operate and produce results for researchers across the country.

A huge thanks to them for supporting our effort!

It’s been an awesome morning and afternoon here at Mozilla headquarters. We launched Firefox 3 this morning and immediately felt the love from millions of people all over the world joining us to set a Guinness World Record for most software downloaded in 24 hours.

Our systems were quite busy earlier this morning so individual requests may not have gotten through - but they are all up now and serving a tremendous amount of traffic and downloads. We are currently serving almost 9,000 downloads a minute, which puts us on track to achieve 5-7 million downloads our first day of general availability.

To put some more color behind what’s been happening on this historic day:

• We exceeded the first day download mark for Firefox 2 of 1.6 million after just five hours of availability for Firefox 3.
• Net Applications is already reporting a 300% positive change in Firefox 3 market share worldwide just today.
• Over 500 articles about the launch were linked to from Google News
• The Firefox 3 launch made the front pages of BBC.co.uk, NYTimes.com, Liberation.fr, laRepubblica.it, Digg, Slashdot, Techcrunch, and Yahoo! News
• The completely redesigned Mozilla.com launched in over 25 language versions
• New community activity on SpreadFirefox.com has skyrocketed with dozens of new groups and hundreds of new postings
• Over 700 community launch parties have been registered on mozillaparty.com

Download Day has already been an amazing demonstration of the power of the Mozilla community. Thank you to each and every one of you who’s contributed to a terrific launch of Firefox 3.

Onwards to a new World Record, together!

Attention Firefox fans:  Now is your chance to help set a Guinness World Record! We’ve already collected over 1.7 million pledges and served up several thousand Firefox 3 downloads.  Phenomenal — let’s see what the next 24 hours has in store!

To be part of the record please download Firefox 3 by 11:16 a.m. PDT (18:16 UTC) on June 18th.  Remember that Guinness is only counting complete downloads.   If you’re using an early version of Firefox 3, such as a beta or release candidate, you’ll need to download the new Firefox 3 to be counted.

Please help us document this history-making event with photos and videos.  Please tag images and videos with “Firefox 3,” “Download Fest,” “World Record,” and “Download Day.”

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.  The 24 hours period will be clocked from that moment.  Thanks for your continued support.

The Mozilla Developer News weblog is carrying an announcement that the final version of Mozilla Firefox 3 will be released on Tuesday 17th June.

"After more than 34 months of active development, and with the contributions of thousands, we're proud to announce that we're ready," the message says. "It is our expectation to ship Firefox 3 this upcoming Tuesday, June 17th."

It should be noted that there is still a small chance that a show-stopper bug could delay the release. However, barring any unforeseen disasters, Firefox fans can now circle next Tuesday in their calendars as Firefox Download Day when millions of users will attempt to set the Guinness World Record for the most software downloads in 24 hours. Anyone planning to host a Mozilla Party on the actual Firefox 3 launch day now also knows which date to target.

The third and final release candidate of Firefox 3 was made available earlier today with a workaround for a Mac OS X bug.

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A third release candidate of Mozilla Firefox 3 has been issued with a workaround for a bug introduced in the latest 10.5.3 update of Mac OS X. The problem causes the operating system to hang on shutdown if an application tries to open the VerifiedDownloadPlugin.plugin file, which is a browser plugin included in OS X and accessed by Firefox under certain circumstances. Though the bug is not caused by Mozilla code, the developers have decided to include a workaround in Firefox 3 to prevent users from being exposed to the hang. The problem has also been reported to Apple.

Firefox 3 Release Candidate 3 can be downloaded from the Firefox release candidates download page or the 3.0rc3 directory of releases.mozilla.org. Existing Firefox 3 release candidate testers can also upgrade using the built-in software update feature of the browser. Note that although RC3 builds are available for Windows and Linux, they do not contain any changes from RC2; only the OS X builds are different.

The Firefox 3 Release Candidate 3 Release Notes contain general information about the improvements in Firefox 3. Technical information about the specific OS X 10.5.3 VerifiedDownloadPlugin.plugin issue can be found in bug 436575.

Interested community members are invited to take part in a Firefox 3 RC3 Testday on Friday. The virtual event will take place in the #testday irc.mozilla.org channel on Friday 11th June between 7:00am and 5:00pm Pacific Daylight Time (2:00pm Friday to midnight Saturday UTC/GMT).

As well as Firefox 3, the VerifiedDownloadPlugin.plugin bug introduced by OS X 10.5.3 also affects Firefox 2. For this reason, the workaround has been checked in to the 1.8 branch and will presumably be included in the next minor update of Firefox 2. Other Mozilla-based applications may also be impacted.

Update: The Firefox 3 RC3 Testday will take place on Friday 13th June, not the non-existent Friday 11th June as stated above.

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