Despite the availability problems that plagued its launch, Firefox 3 has already surpassed the 5 million downloads mark and is still counting.

According to President of Mozilla Europe, Tristan Nitot, in just 14 hours, the new web browser has registered 5 million downloads, exceeding even the expectations of its creators.

Firefox 3 is bringing more than 15,000 improvements and according to Mozilla Foundation, the internal tests revealed that the new browser is several times faster than Internet Explorer 7 and the previous version, Firefox 2.

Firefox 3.0 will bring several improvements, which include new security features and tools, several back-end platform enhancements and a redesign of the bookmarking and browser history.

However, the most important improvement that the new browser will feature is probably the malware check, which is a phishing filter-like tool that will warn users attempting to access a URL blacklisted for suspected malicious code hosting.

Phishing has become a real problem among Internet users, and thus Mozilla’s initiative is welcomed, although the effectiveness of the method is still doubted, if one takes into account that the new malware web sites appear and disappear on a daily basis specifically to avoid being blacklisted.

Firefox 3.0 relies on the new Gecko 1.9 Web rendering engine, which is designed to enhance stability and performance, among other things.

Firefox 3 has added some other interesting features. For example,  Firefox 3 has also a number of ease of use enhancements.

It offers easier password management,  simplified add-on installation, new Download Manager, full page zoom, tab scrolling and quickmenu and text selection improvements: Multiple text selections can be made with Ctrl/Cmd; Double-click drag selects in "word-by-word" mode; Triple-clicking selects a paragraph.

One of the best features is the resumable downloading: users can now resume downloads after restarting the browser or resetting the network connection. On the interface side, Firefox 3 has introduced a simpler management of bookmarks.

Though what’s even better for Firefox 3 so far is not only the download frenzy, but the positive reviews given by the media and bloggers alike.

So, Microsoft maybe should start to really, really worry about the new Internet star.