Mozilla Releases Firefox 3
Published:
Mozilla released Firefox 3 in June 2008 after a public campaign that attempted to set a world record for software downloads in a single day. The release included a new bookmarking and history interface known as the “Awesome Bar,” improved standards support, and major performance work.
Firefox 3 used a newer version of the Gecko rendering engine and introduced the Places system, which stored bookmarks and browsing history in SQLite rather than in older flat-file formats. Memory usage was also a major engineering focus because Firefox 2 had been criticized for long-running sessions that consumed large amounts of RAM.
The release arrived just months before Google Chrome. Firefox was still one of the strongest challengers to Internet Explorer, but browser competition was about to accelerate dramatically around JavaScript speed, process isolation, security, and rapid release cycles.