Firefox 3 release date: June 17

The developers of the open source browser want to set a world record. But will rows about tracking data upset things?

Firefox 3, which has been going through various release candidates for a while, will have its official launch date on June 17 (that's Tuesday). The Mozilla Foundation wants to set a Guinness World Record by setting the record for the most downloads in 24 hours.

The present record is held by... actually, it isn't held by anyone, so that should make this pretty easy to succeed in. One assumes that this won't be from mirror sites, but from the Mozilla servers themselves? Otherwise it would be hard to track.

And speaking of tracking...

On his blog, John Lilly, Mozilla's chief executive noted in May that after a conversation with Mike Arrington of Techcrunch, that

we asked ourselves what we can do to help unlock some of this latent potential — and started thinking about whether there's a project we can do at Mozilla that does a few things:

1. Collects & shares data in a way that embodies the user control & privacy options which are at Mozilla's core.
2. Enables everyone — from individual researchers and entrepreneurs (both the social and capitalist types) to the largest organizations in the world — to take usage data, mix it up, mash it up, derive insight, and hopefully share some of that insight with others.
3. Helps move the conversation around data collection and web usage forward, to help consumers make more informed decisions.

But as he notes

We've got a couple of projects started at a small level in this area — one is called Spectator, an add-on mostly used to improve the user interface of Firefox, and another is a project in Mozilla Labs called Test Pilot. They're both early and very limited in scope.

It's that idea of tracking *at all* that has got some people worked up. "Spyware" is one of the words being thrown around (in a rather cavalier fashion, it must be said). Lilly replies:

nobody plans to make [Firefox] spyware, I tried to make it clear that we'd only do this by figuring out a way to be very very opt-in, the data would be open to everyone, and not personal in any way. That's why we're talking about it in the very early stages as we explore the space.

We'll have to watch to see that this meme doesn't get amplified.

But that aside, is FF3 (as it's being known) going to be any good? Firefox 2 was heavily criticised as a memory hog, for having memory leaks. But there's been a lot of work on FF3, especially on the memory footprint, and it seems people are much happier. Walt Mossberg has declared it "the best browser out there right now" (make of that what you will).

Are you going to switch? Back? Forward? Sideways? (Me, I'm happy with Camino, a Mac-only build that uses the Gecko core. Fast, light, even if it doesn't have a million extensions, because it's got a Mac look - which Firefox has never managed.)

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