I guess even the makers of Firefox 3 are surprised and thrilled by what is happening. Their just-released browser has reached the 5 million downloads milestone and in 24 hours Firefox 3 registered 7.6 million copies downloaded. At the time of writing, the frenzy was far from over and Mozilla’s promotional page from Spreadfirefox.com was showing 8,5 million downloads.

According to Mozilla, almost 2,7 million users have downloaded Firefox 3 only in the United States. Germany has ranked second in the Top 10 of Firefox fans with 700,000 downloads, while in Spain and France the browser has surpassed 300,000 downloads.

Mozilla Foundation had to solve some technical problems, its servers being unable to face the demand, but now everything seems to work just fine. The people of Guinness World Record still have to review Mozilla’s World Record attempt.

Anyhow, with or without the World record, one thing is clear: Firefox 3 is on its way to become a mainstream browser.

Firefox 3 offers malware protection, web forgery protection page, anti-virus integration, Vista parental controls, better protection against cross-site JSON data leaks and much more.

In terms of performance, Firefox 3.0 promises better speed, by bringing improvements to the JavaScript engine, a reduced amount of memory used (after hundreds of leaks have been fixed), and better reliability (with user bookmarks, cookies and preferences stored in a secure database format) preventing data loss and system crashes.

The new Smart Bookmarks will enable the categorization of user’s folders by several criteria, such as the most frequently visited, recently bookmarked and recently tagged websites.

Firefox 3 integrates a revised download manager which makes it much easier to locate downloaded files. Now the users can see and search on the name of the website where a file came from. Also, active downloads and time remaining are always shown in the status bar as the files are download.

Another feature is resumable downloading, that means the users can now resume downloads after restarting the browser or resetting the network connection.

Firefox 3 Beta 4 also features a new location bar and auto-complete capability. Now, a user can type in all or part of the title, tag or address of a page to see a list of matches from his history and bookmarks: a new display makes it easier to scan through the matching results and find the needed page. Results are returned according to their frequency (a combination of frequency and recency of visits to that page) ensuring that the user is seeing the most relevant matches.

Meanwhile, the analysts are predicting that Firefox 3 will help Mozilla to reach another milestone: a 20 percent share of the browser market.

Despite its rising popularity and rhythm of adoption, Firefox is till the number two on the market, behind Microsoft’s Internet Explorer.

Microsoft promised to release the second beta of its upcoming Internet Explorer 8 during August, which means that the final version will see the “light of day” sometimes in November or December. It would be interesting to see how many people will rush to download Internet Explorer 8.