It's almost here. Today (17 June) you will be able to download Firefox 3 (final version) for the first time. At the writing of this post, it's not yet available, but when you read this, you might already be able to download it. As mentioned in a previous post, Mozilla is trying to set a record for the most downloaded software in 24 hours. At the moment, they already have almost 1.5 million pledges to download. They are aiming for 5 million downloads on the first day, but I don't know if they will achieve it. Nonetheless they will most probably exceed their previous record, set by Firefox 2, with just under 2 million downloads on the first day. So when you read this, head over to Firefox's page, and see if Firefox 3 is available for download. And if it is, support this world record attempt by downloading it. Please note that just updating Firefox from Firefox itself won't count towards the record, since it's not a full download.

UPDATE: Firefox 3 is to be released today at 17h00 GMT.

UPDATE 2: It seems Firefox is "available" for download now, but the link on Firefox's home page still points to the latest version of Firefox 2. Is Mozilla having problems coping with the huge loads of requests? Or maybe they didn't get FF 3 ready for launch, and are now masquerading FF 2 as FF 3?

UPDATE 3: Firefox was downloaded over 8 million times in the first 24 hours! That's amazing. I honestly doubted whether they would even get to 3 or 4 million.

Another new tool for getting your blog to the people is now out there. It's called rssHugger. The site aims to help people promote their own blogs by sending them traffic. The concept seems simple enough. Once you have signed up for an account, your site is listed on rssHugger, ready to be found by poeple searching for interesting content. You also have a separate page for your blog on rssHugger, which you can promote yourself. The more people visit your page on rssHugger, the higher your "ranking" will be. And if you're lucky enough to get into the Top 100, your blog will receive some extra attention. But the Top 100 page gets reset every month, so everyone has a fair fighting chance.

I myself have just signed up for this service, and my blog's page is here. Since my account is not active yet, you won't be able to see much. But in a day or two, some content should be visible on that page. I am anxious to see what rssHugger can do. Once I have used it for a while, I will let you know about whether it has done anything for this blog. It seems like a good idea, but only time will tell. 

For a while now, I have become increasingly annoyed with the wonderful ability of Acrobat 8 to start updating itself without even asking. And as far as I could tell, there is no setting to disable this feature. Once you leave Acrobat open for a few minutes, it starts downloading automatically. You have to stop the process yourself then. Another thing I don't like, although not particularly annoying, is that Acrobat loads a program into memory that makes the loading of PDF files faster.

So today I decided to look for an alternative. And I found a very suitable one. Foxit Reader. I knew of this piece of software for a while already, but somehow never really bothered to check it out. I guess desperation can drive you to try new things. First of all, the program comes in at under 3MB, compared to Acrobat's 20+MB. Secondly, Foxit does not load any extra processes into memory. I noted that despite this fact, PDF files still loaded at least as quickly as with Acrobat. And lastly, it looks like Foxit does not automatically start downloading without checking with anyone. So far so good. The Foxit Reader is also available for Linux.