Ahh, the power of marketing. Mozilla has announced that they’ve officially been added to the Guinness World Records for most downloads in a 24-hour period. The final tally: 8,002,530 downloads of Firefox 3 back on June 18th.

A recent collaborative study between Google, the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, and IBM offers new insight into how many people surfing the web are doing so safely.

Firefox has already surpassed the 5 million download mark it set out to meet in its first 24 hours. As I write this, the browser just passed the 7 million download mark for its version 3.0 software, and with over 6800 downloads per minute (and rising) is on track to do 8 million or more by 1pm ET (24 hours since the download went live).

The newest version of our favorite open source web browser, Mozilla Firefox 3, offers dozens of new features and fixes, but only a handful will make the most dramatic difference in your everyday browsing. After 17 months of alphas and betas, Mozilla's finally made a feature-complete release candidate available, so it's time to spotlight the biggest improvements that will make "Gran Paradiso" the browser to beat.

Once you've downloaded and installed Firefox 3.0, start using it on Gaia and use this thread to let us know of any issues with the latest version.

Next month, after three years of development and six months of public testing, Mozilla, the insurgent browser developer that rose from the ashes of Netscape, will release Firefox 3.0. It will feature a few tricks that could change the way people organize and find the sites they visit most frequently.

IE NetRenderer allows you to check how a website is rendered by Internet Explorer 7, 6 or 5.5, as seen from a high speed datacenter located in Germany. Just type in a URL in the field above and try it out - it's free!

High Performance Websites: 14 rules for fast web pages

One of the main gripes against AJAX webapps is how they break the back button in a typical browser. There have been a few solutions (notably Brad Neuberg’s Really Simple History) but none have got it working in Safari. GMail still does not have a working back button in Safari...I finally figured out a way to get this working in Firefox, IE and Safari. I have not tested it in Opera. Here is what I did. As usual, your mileage will most likely vary.

Julien is the author of a new, experimental YUI component, the Browser History Manager, which was released earlier this week. In this article, he explores the broad problems associated with controlling history and state in the browser during rich interactions and he lays out the multifaceted approach he took to building a YUI history manager with support for all A-Grade browsers.