FireFox 3 Released Today!

Today is the official launch date for Mozilla's Firefox 3! The new version of the browser promises quite a few new features include performance improvements.

Below is an excerpt of a few new features.

Improved Platform for Developers

• New graphics and font handling: new graphics and text rendering
  architectures in Gecko 1.9 provides rendering improvements in CSS, SVG as well
  as improved display of fonts with ligatures and complex scripts.
• Color management: (set gfx.color_management.enabled on in
  about:config and restart the browser to enable.) Firefox can now adjust images
  with embedded color profiles.
• Offline support: enables web applications to provide offline
  functionality (website authors must add support for offline browsing to their
  site for this feature to be available to users).
• A more complete overview of href="http://developer.mozilla.org/en/docs/Firefox_3_for_developers">Firefox 3
  for developers is available for website and add-on developers.

Improved Performance

• Speed: improvements to our JavaScript engine as well as profile guided
  optimizations have resulted in continued improvements in performance.
  Compared to Firefox 2, web applications like Google Mail and Zoho Office
  run twice as fast in Firefox 3, and the popular
  SunSpider test from Apple shows improvements over previous releases.
• Memory usage: Several new technologies work together to reduce the amount
  of memory used by Firefox 3 over a web browsing session.
  Memory cycles are broken and collected by an automated cycle collector, a new
  memory allocator reduces fragmentation, hundreds of leaks have been fixed, and
  caching strategies have been tuned.
• Reliability: A user's bookmarks, history, cookies, and preferences
  are now stored in a transactionally secure database format which will prevent
  data loss even if their system crashes.

You can read all about the new features here.

I am just waiting until I can download the software (should be any moment) and I'd love to hear if you plan on downloading Firefox 3 or if you prefer a different browser.