Desktop users, developers, and reviewers all had their download managers aimed at the Firefox Web site Monday to grab Firefox 3 as soon as it launched and also help Mozilla set a world record. World record or not, the latest Firefox release is a world-class Web browser. It looks impressive, renders text and images better than its predecessor, and helps you browse safely.

"Mozilla has released details on The Coop, a new product that will incorporate social networking features directly into the Firefox browser. This is not good news for the privately-backed social browser Flock (also built on Mozilla), which is yet to release a 1.0 version of its browser.

"In just a few days the new Firefox 3 browser from the house of Mozilla will be release. Except of course if another re-build of the current release candidate has to be made, which would push the publishing of the newest browser to sometime in June. One such reason could be the ease somebody can spoof the secure mode indicator of secured sites, specially on the [GNU] platform.

Firefox 3 will include some significant changes. It uses version 1.9 of the Gecko rendering engine–which itself hasn't been released yet and which includes the Cairo graphics layer. There are also a wide range of improvements to performance, stability, and security, and it's also going to present several new user facing features.

The Find command in Firefox locates the user-specified text in the body of a Web page. The command is an easy-to-use tool that works well enough for most users most of the time. Sometimes, however, a more powerful Find-like tool would make locating text easier.

"With Emacs' reputation for including everything _and_ the kitchen sink, you probably won't be surprised to hear that there's more than one way to surf the Internet using your text editor. With today's Javascript- and image-heavy websites, it can be hard to believe that anyone would use a text-based browser with limited support for many of the things we take for granted.

"...If you are old enough, you may remember the Mozilla Application Suite that preceded standalone Firefox and Thunderbird. The Mozilla suite featured an integrated browser, email/news client, IRC chat client, and HTML page editor. When the Mozilla Foundation officially stopped developing the suite in 2003, the first three components lived on in Firefox, Thunderbird, and ChatZilla.

"Mozilla ruffled some penguin feathers last month when the organization revealed that Firefox 3 would get an extensive visual refresh to maximize integration with Windows and Mac OS X, but not Linux. After the decision was widely criticized by Linux enthusiasts, Mozilla reversed its position and decided to revisit Linux theming.

A tweaked graphics interface, a tagging tool and an extension that provides relevant keywords for associating with bookmarked sites have been named the best new add-ons for Firefox 3.0, following a contest set up by open-source browser developer Mozilla.