Finally the day has arrived and final release of Firefox 3 is out on open and IE is getting its butt kicked left and right.

Mozilla Foundation had conducted its PR greatly but the execution was poor. First the time of release was not officially announced and all the eastern hemisphere netizens had to guess the whole day when Firefox 3 was getting out and finally it dawned that it would be midnight for most. The time came and when I went will all anticipation, all I got was server time outs and after a few reloads and refreshes,  I was met with this sweet outage page.

OK this was not a great surprise since everybody was trying, the Mozilla servers were melting with the load. But the real surprise was when after nearly an hour of reloading the browser, I finally met with a page to download Firefox but alas it was Firefox 2. The page design was for Firefox 3, but the release was 2.0.0.14

So after another disappointment, I got back to reloading, refreshing and after nearly another one hour got the sweet link for a download and installed it finally. Did another download in my other system and finally got it also up and running.

So after doing my duty to the Mozilla’s Community decided to check out how the Download day was going on. The total downloads till 00:45 GST on 18th June 2008 was 1,861,546 downloads. UAE – 1480, Afghanistan – 0, Iraq – 62, Mynammar – 0, Iran – 6422, Sudan – 54, Somalia – 0, Cuba – 414, Oman – 0, Mongolia – 0, North Korea – 0

For who needs to show around that they did their part on the download day, you can flaunt it here. You will get a certificate like this one below.

Update : The time is 10:30 AM on 18th June 2008, nearly 12 hours after the launch of Firefox 3 and the stastics for the downloads are as below

Total Downloads : 4,462,863

UAE – 2400, Afghanistan – 62, Iraq – 101, Mynammar – 211, Iran – 133,500, Sudan – 73, Somalia -  Still 0, Cuba – 557, Oman – 212, Mongolia -281, North Korea – Still 0, Chad – 0,

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The entire community living in the eastern hemisphere of the globe have to wait a little longer to taste the final release of Firefox 3. According to the Mozilla blog, the record attempt will start at 10:00AM PDT [05:00PM UTC] [10:30PM IST] [09:00PM GST] on June 17th 2008 CE. But do remember you have entire tomorrow also to download.

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Finally the word is out… The Download day or the day IE get its a$$ kicked is 17th June 2008. It is celebration time at Mozilla Community as the market share is steadily growing for Firefox and every other news service is covering this huge event. My Google News alerts for Firefox is flooding with the release news. Also another reason for the Mozilla Foundation to open the cork would be the 10th anniversary of its launch. On March 31st 1998, the first Mozilla Code became publicly available under the Open Source License and Mozilla Foundation took shape.

So for the people who are joining this party late… Please download your copy of Firefox on June 17th from here

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For those who didn’t jump the bandwagon with RC1 release of Firefox 3, now is the time to check it out the all new faster, safer Fox… This is the final release candidate of the new broswer with latest Gecko 1.9 Engine and the public release can be expected any time in June. Watch out for the day since it is called as the “Download Day” and Mozilla Foundation is aiming for a record number of downloads within 24 hours of the release. You can help the cause by downloading FF3 at your home, work and help spread the word.