By Mark O’Neill
Contributing Writer, [GAS]

Mozilla has finally announced the release date for Firefox 3 – Tuesday June 17th – 5 days from now. Mark it in your calendars folks!

It’s taken 34 months to develop Firefox 3 and anticipation is high. I tried out one of the preview versions when I was helping out a developer with his new Firefox extension and the browser seemed to be quite nice.

Mozilla claims that FF3 is faster than its predecessor but I didn’t notice any startling difference. But the interface is much nicer to work with and that matters if you work with the browser all day.

I particularly like the drop-down address bar and how it shows the favicons of where you have visited :

The question though is whether all of the extensions will be compatible in time for the 17th. All of the extensions that I have installed are ones I need on a daily basis, and discovering they are incompatible will mean I will have to continue using Firefox 2. But from what I hear, developers have really been hard at work to ensure that most extensions will be ready. So I am hopeful that everything will be fine and ready to go.

So put a big circle around the 17th on your calendar and get ready to make that day a world record in downloading and to say a big Adios to the *ahem* buggy and unreliable Firefox 2!!