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At present Firefox has some 18 per cent of the global browser market, which has been made faster, more secure and customisable and comes with malware and forgery protection

With the release of Firefox 3, analysts say that Mozilla will see a boost in downloads and thus also market share. Microsoft's next version of Internet Explorer won't come to market until later this year.

Next week, Mozilla will release Firefox 3 which  will be downloadable free from the Mozilla Web site. Mozilla says this is going to be the "best browser on the market today".

Firefox 3 is based on the Gecko 1.9 Web rendering platform and will have more than 15,000 updates, including some major re-architecting for improved performance, stability, rendering correctness, and code simplification and sustainability.

The result, Mozilla says, is a "more secure, easier to use, more personal product with a lot more under the hood to offer Web-site and Firefox add-on developers".

Moreover, the Firefox team says it wants to set a new Guinness World Record for the most software downloaded on a single day and to get a jump start, they've been registering users who pledge to download Firefox 3 when it's released. Talk about being keen!