Firefox 3 has been officially released, and is available for download now!

There have been a lot of updates, both visually and backend. The single biggest change is the new Gecko 1.9 rendering engine. This gives Firefox 3 the most complete implementation of the W3C standards out of all major browsers, and likely all browsers that exist. This is not something that the average user will shout for joy over, but web developers are probably doing a little dance in their chairs right now.

On the more visual side, there is a new address bar, that does more than just recall the last 20 addresses typed into it. It searches history and bookmarks to give you results that might relate, giving you quicker access to important sites. It also weighs results based on how often you visit them. This, for example, is important if you constantly visit the BYOND developer forums, and just want to type "developer" in the address bar, but you recently went to the GIMP developers website. It's pretty nifty, but I can't say I use it much(then again, I don't use bookmarks or history either).

Another big change is bookmarking. For bookmark lovers, FF3 adds the ability to tag bookmarks much like you tag BYOND blog posts. This allows you to use "Smart" folders to access only bookmarks involving Linux, programming, or IM clients. Even though some of the bookmarks might cover multiple topics, you will be able to access them in their right folder without bookmarking them twice.

One small feature that I've found very useful is better mime type support. Allowing you to customise what certain filetypes launch, including web based services like Yahoo Mail or Google Reader. It is very handy.

Get Firefox now!

[edit]Eek! Seems Mozilla has been overloaded by the landrush of all this. Well, I'm sure they expected it. Keep on trying, they are trying to break a non-existent record here![/edit]