The Mozilla Foundation announced that the new version of the Firefox web browser will be released on June 17th. Firefox 3.0 will improve standards compliance, fix performance issues, and add new features. The latest release candidate version (3.0 RC3) can be downloaded here.

Mozilla has set a high goal for this latest release. They expect to set a world record for the most downloads of an application in a single day. On a dedicated webpage, people can pledge to participate in the drive to secure Firefox a place into the Guinness Book of World Records.

Firefox has been steadily gaining ground in browser market share charts ever since its first release, back in 2004. It is regarded as the most serious threat to the dominance of the Internet Explorer family of browsers. The active developer community behind Firefox is often considered one of the projects's greatest assets, because it constantly extends the capabilities of the browser by contributing a variety of add-ons.

In related news, the Opera browser has reached another milestone with the release of version 9.5. Like Firefox, Opera is free to download and use, but unlike Mozilla's software Opera is released under a closed source license.