OStatic

Mozilla has finally set an official date for the release of version 3 of the Firefox browser. "After more than 34 months of active development, and with the contributions of thousands, we're proud to announce that we're ready," a message from Mozilla says. "It is our expectation to ship Firefox 3 this upcoming Tuesday, June 17th." Wow, that's only days from now. Here are some of the related details, and what could delay the release.

Mozilla does hedge its bets in its announcement. "It should be noted that there is still a small chance that a show-stopper bug could delay the release," says Mozilla's statement.

There is also a third Release Candidate now available for download. Note, though, that RC3, according to Mozilla "contains a single change for Mac OS X users only; there is no change for users running previous Firefox Release Candidate versions on Windows or Linux."

As we previously announced, Mozilla wants to set a world record for most software downloaded in one day. Its Download Day site has more details. The goal is to set a Guinness world record this Tuesday.

As we've been covering, version 3 of Firefox is far faster than previous versions, has much better memory handling (you want it if you work with a lot of tabs), has new security enhancements and more. The chief complaint about the release candidates has been that they don't run Firefox extensions, but that problem should be history on Tuesday.

• firefox
• mozilla