Mozilla has finally set a date for the official launch of Firefox 3 - which open sourcers hope will set a world record for most ever downloads in a day.

Firefox 3.0 will be ready for download from next Tuesday - 17 June. But the big day, dubbed Download Day, could be delayed if a serious bug is uncovered at the last minute. The browser claims to be quicker, more stable and to make it easier to set bookmarks.

Mozilla hopes to get at least 1.6 million downloads within 24 hours and set a new Guinness world record. It hopes Firefox fans will organise parties and get people to sign pledges to download the browser. Mozilla claims to have received over 40,000 pledges from the UK and more than 180,000 from the US.

Firefox accounts for some 20 to 30 per cent of browser market share, depending on whose figures you believe. It is the most popular of the alternative browsers - those that are not pre-installed on PCs.

More on the record attempt at spreadfirefox.com

I have been using Ubuntu and just upgraded to Hardy heron. It came loaded with Firefox 3 b preloaded with it. Two weeks ago it upgraded my Firefox to 3.0b5 and a few days ago it said i had a new update for Firefox. At that time I check the version of my current version and it indeed said version 3.0b5. I thought the upgrade would have been to their rc2 but it wasn't. The current version it tells me now is version 3.0, no beta. It is fast and has some cool new things. I am just waiting for people to update those plugins and style I used in version two. Other than that I have been enjoying Firefox 3

Parties to install firefox? I think I'll stay home and clip my toenails or something even more exciting

who is buying the first round?

nothing differant than those fanatics who have parties for movies :shrug:

If you have doubles, do you wanna trade? I'll be doing the same thing I think.

How hard can that be already. Will it read your mind and set it automatically if you hover on the page for more than 30 seconds?

BTW - went to this site and couldn't see the date mentioned. Just said 'late June'. So not sure if the date has been delayed.

This page states that "Download Day" ( woo hoo! :sarcastic_woo_hoo: ) starts on June 17th at 10 a.m. PDT so I think that's 18:00 UK time.

looks like their site has crashed LOL