Congratulatory cake delivered to Mozilla, Microsoft's IE (Internet Explorer) team might want to eat this!

Five odd hours into the release of Mozilla's latest "Firefox 3" Internet browser, and the newbie seems to have garnered as many as 1.6 million downloads -- a number its predecessor 'Firefox 2' saw only at the end of one whole day, claim developers of Firefox 3. The opening hours alone recorded as many as 9,000 free copies being distributed on a per minute basis. Downloads continued well into the next day with Mozilla rallying support of its fans in trying to break an all new Guinness World Record for the largest number of software downloads in 24 hours -- a difficult but not impossible task.Possibly the same kind of enthusiasm was responsible for a delayed release earlier on Tuesday when traffic to the MozillaWeb site (http://www.getfirefox.com) overwhelmed Firefox Web servers causing the Web site to crash and remain slow or worse - unreachable - for a good two hours. Free downloads of Firefox 3 began only after the problem was solved.

About Firefox 3: Mozilla claims the newest iteration of its browser allows for fast, secure, and easy-to-customize Internet surfing. Firefox 3 is being made available in 50 languages, and according to Mozilla, is "at least twice as fast as its predecessor" besides boasting "15,000 improvements" that include malware protection. Firefox 3 is available as a free download for computers running Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X operating systems.

Since the launch of the very first Firefox in November of 2004, Mozilla claims the browser has spread to over 175 million users and 230 coutries, so much so that it now comes a close second to Microsoft's ubiquitous Internet Explorer. Although many would counter that saying Firefox is the best!