Mozilla Firefox 3 Release Candidate 1 is Out
At long last, Mozilla Firefox 3 is out of the oven. It’s not ready for eating just quite yet, but after years spent tweaking to get the recipe just right, the open-source browser is finalized and fully-baked. It’s now sitting on the windowsill, cooling off.
Firefox 3 Release Candidate 1 is here. The release candidate stage is the stage right between beta and final release, and it’s the last chance for developers to test their code against the browser before it’s push out into the world full-force. It’s also the stage at which add-on developers can update their browser extensions without worrying about further code changes.
So if you’ve been holding off downloading FF3 because you’re waiting for your favorite extension or you’re nervous about running unstable software, you may want to wait a couple more weeks — the final browser is expected in June. But for the rest of us, it’s stable enough to use every day. So was the beta 5 release, which we’ve been using full-time for the last month or two, but this RC1 release has several improvements.
The Mozilla team has made changes to Firefox 3’s user interface on Vista, XP, Mac OS X and Linux, all based on user feedback. They’ve also fine-tuned some of the behaviors in the location bar (also known as the “Awesome bar,” the awesomeness which is sure to be a source of debate). Page rendering has been evened out across the various platforms, and some tweaks have been made to the JavaScript engine to improve the performance of script-heavy webapps like Gmail. Mike Beltzner of Mozilla writes about these and other improvements in the release announcement.
The curious can download Firefox 3 RC1 from Mozilla’s website and test it out. Be sure to let us know what you think in the comments.
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